Yet Another IT Professional Blog

If you're getting an internal error while trying to run the Get-VMHostFirmware command with vSphere PowerCli, chances are the problem comes from a corrupt scratch directory on the hypervisor. The Get-VMHostFirmware command is one of my favorites if I'm doing any maintenance on the hosts. It saved me hours of configuration multiple times... Very handy! But recently, I needed to run the command on one of my hosts and I was getting an internal error! Nothing more... Even after a reboot and trying all the other methods of configuration backup mentioned here, still no luck!

This is a storage performance report that I have done on 3 different storage types. I was curious to see the performance difference between different types of iSCSI storage units. I wanted to share the results with others because when I wanted to compare my results with others, I was surprised to see that there are a lot of people discussing about storage technologies and all but no one is actually sharing their benchmarks openly. Because, a storage benchmark can vary a lot depending on your environment, I am going to list my setup so you can compare these results to your own environment as close as possible.

Yep... Another update and another bug. I just applied this months updates on my computer at home and guess what? It caused almost a "fatal" error on my VMWare Workstation virtual machines! As soon as my computer boots, I tried to fire one of my vms and I got the following scary message.

Altough it's been a while that Windows 8 is out on the market, I never had to play around with the Windows 8 images and syspreps as I had to with Windows 7. I decided to prepare me a nice updated image of Windows 8 in a vm and sysprep it and use it as template for my lab environment. The plan is simple...

I have a VMDK file that was used for a Windows Server VM as a secondary disk to store only archive files. When I had to scrap the VM and redo it from 0. As any lazy admin would do, I tried to be smart and just reinstall the OS on a different VMDK and copy over the secondary VMDK, rename it, attach it to the virtual machine and off you go… Things are never as easy as you imagine it would be with computer systems J . Here is another adventure of just a renaming simple VMDK file; If VSphere Gui doesn’t let you rename a file, you can do it through a PuttY ssh session;  Open an SSH session to one of your hosts.   Browse to your DataStore which has the VMDK file. cd /vmfs/volumes/DatastoreName/originalname Use the following command to rename a file;    vmkfstools -E "originalname.vmdk" "newname.vmdk" For more information about manipulating files in datastores or using the “vmkfstools”; http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?c...

Recently I have created multiple virtual machines using VMWare Workstation 9. I wanted to prepare template VMs already installed, updated, patched and configured... Just ready to load and start my super clean VM lab. So after hours of work, all  my vms were ready with a nice Sysprep finish :) But when I started to use them, I realized that I could not open my vms... I was just copying the template VM folder that I created earlier into another folder and just renaming the folder for my personal use, but i never renamed the actual files of vms. I would go from my VMware Workstation and do "File", "Open" . Surprise! "Failed to lock the file. Cannot open the disk 'C:\path\vmfilename.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on. Here is what I found. Actually, I think it will be even better if I just state the most important part of the VMWare knowledge base article # 1038189 regarding this problem. Here is the WHY? ; The error   Failed to loc...