PowerShell script for Service Console memory

Forbes Guthrie5 Comments

Here is a script that will query all your ESX hosts and create a report of what their Service Console memory is set to.  Like most people I always set this to 800MB after an install, but when you are dealing with a large environment it’s all too easy to miss some.  Having your Service Console memory set too low can create some very peculiar errors and cause a complete lockup of certain processes (which then requires a host reboot).

I am certainly no PowerShell expert and must credit Mr Hugo Peeters (www.peetersonline.nl) with all the logic behind the script. I just want to post the whole script so everyone can benefit.

Grab the script here. Just rename it with a “.ps1” extension, edit the script to point to your VC and run it as usual.

If the Actual and Configured values are different, this means that you’ve changed the Service Console memory but not yet rebooted.

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P.S. If you do discover any hosts that aren’t set with the full 800MB, you’ll want to run a “free –m” at the Console to see how large the Swap Partition is. Hopefully this will be the recommended 1600MB, to ensure the “Service Console x 2” rule. If not, you really have 3 options:

  • Leave the memory set as it is.
  • Rebuild the host with the correct partitioning.
  • Augment the Swap Partition with a Swap File on another partition (there are a couple of excellent forum posts explaining how to do this if you’re not sure).

New release – vmreference card 1.3

Forbes Guthrie8 Comments

I’ve just finished updating my reference card.  The biggest change is that I’ve moved everything to the latest update of 3.5 as the default.

  • Updated the details to the latest Configuration Maximums PDF.
  • Updated it to include 3.5 update 3 release notes.
  • Changed the versioning to include the latest VMware release, so its more obvious how up to date (or not) your card is.
  • Some minor additions (NAS maximums) and corrections.

Many thanks to all the readers who have written in with comments.  Always welcome.

Go and grab it here: http://www.vreference.com/vi3-card

Recreate header/descriptor vmdk files & recover failed Storage VMotion (DMotion)

Forbes GuthrieNo Comments

I had a another problem with Storage VMotion yesterday and found out a couple of interesting things.

Firstly, there is a now a Knowledge Base article explaining how to recreate vmdk header files if they are missing.  This was news to me, so here’s the link:

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1004232

Secondly, was discovering a sightly different approach to recovering a failed Storage VMotion (DMotion).  My previous experiences had involved something along these lines:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/999890#999890

Which basically breaks down to creating another snapshot, so that you will then be able to force a vmware-cmd …/vmname.vmx removesnapshots

However this approach was messy, didn’t always commit properly and required editing the vmx file.

So yesterday, when facing a similar problem, I saw it resolved in slightly different way.  We started by checking the linking of parentCID to CID in the vmdk header files, as we had an issue with all the different DMotion snapshot files.  Then to commit the snapshots, we used vmkfstools -i <last_snapshot.vmdk> <destination.vmdk> to clone the disk to another file.  By sending the clone command to the last snapshot header file, it knew to roll all the chained snapshots, along with the original disk, into this new copy.

Obviously this method requires extra space for the second copy and can take longer, but you have the advantage that the original are untouched.

Update:

VMware has just released a new KB article covering the whole process: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1007849