Scsi with a Parachute

Great stuff: utilize the power of your SAN and have ESX(i) churn a lot less at the same time when your VDI boxes use their disks. Sounds good? It is. But: Microsoft doesn't provide us with a driver for the VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) adapter when booting from the install DVD. So - what now?

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Gimme some space, man

Most modern virtualization software lets you add a disk (and hence: disk space!) to your virtual machines while the machine is powered on. That's great - but then the VM's operating system needs to be able to do something with it.

In Linux, that can be quite a chore. Especially if the disk running out of space is your / partition.... In this article, I'll show you what to do about that. And no, it's not scary. Almost.

Read more: Gimme some space, man

Oops - my VM is stuck!

One of the drawbacks of a virtual machine is... that it does not have a power plug! So you can't, after all else failed, pull the plug to get it to turn off.

So what do you do if you "Reset" a virtual machine in VMWare ESXi and it gets stuck at 95% of doing so? Wait - right? But what if it's still sitting there being stuck a few hours later? Then you begin to panic. Especially if said VM is the one running your vCenter...

Read more: Oops - my VM is stuck!

Shrinking a VMDK

Resizing a disk in VMWare vSphere (or ESX 4i, for that matter) is a piece of cake - at least, when it comes to increasing diskspace for a VM. All you do is change the VM's settings, run a tool like Diskpart (if you're using Windows in your VM) - and you're set.

But - what about shrinking it? Now that's a whole different ballgame. Especially if the VM is running Windows Server 2008 R2 - and you want to resize its boot disk... with it's "interesting" disk layout...

Read more: Shrinking a VMDK

Subcategories

  • VMWare
  • App-V

    Well, this could be part of the "Microsoft" category as well. Heck, who cares. It's where we talk about Application Virtualization - the Microsoft way. So go figure.