It’s sometimes necessary (say you’ve been working on a VM on your local workstation in either VMWare Fusion, or VMWare Workstation) to move the VM you’ve been playing with to an ESXi instance to either move into development or to have it properly backed up etc. The easiest way I find to do this is […]
Upgrading vCenter Server Appliance to vCSA 5.5
So you’ve downloaded all the new VMWare 5.5 goodies and you want to upgrade your vCSA install to v5.5 – this is a little more involved than you may think, however it is very much worth the effort: In vSphere 5.5, the vCenter Server Appliance limitations have been extremely raised when using the embedded database: Previous […]
vSAN + vSphere 5.5 Release Date and Download
VMWare’s vSAN Community site has been launched today in preparation for the release of vSphere 5.5 including the new vSAN feature (clustered, replicated local storage on hosts acting as a “Virtual SAN”). You can have a look at the walkthroughs here. You can sign up for the beta program here, more vSAN info available here. […]
Zero free space using SDelete to shrink Thin Provisioned VMDK
Some things should be simple, shrinking a thin provisioned virtual disk should be one of them, it’s not. N.B. This will just reduce the VMDK’s usage on the VMFS datastore NOT resize the “provisioned size” of a thin disk. To shrink a VMDK we can use an ESX command line tool “vmkfstools”, but first you […]