I just noticed this great tip from a VMware's KB! Sometimes I face this issue when everyone can't stop asking for snapshots or can't let go! The cumulative storage growth could be severe sometimes that may get my VMFS volume full. In this KB article you can change the snapshot location for specific VMs to another place, and have a piece of mind!

• Power off the virtual machine.
• Add the following line to the VMX configuration file for the virtual machine: workingDir="<new_path_location>"
• For example: workingDir="/vmfs/volumes/46f1225f-552b0069-e03b-00145e808070/vm-snapshots"
• To reload virtual machine configuration, run the command: # vimsh -ne "vmsvc/reload <VmId>"
• When you power on the virtual machine, snapshot files and VSWP files are created in the new location.

KB URL: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1002929

In this video I'll be demonstrating the following in order:

• Enable the Hot-Add/Plug in the virtual machines.
• Hot-Add memory for a VM and increase it from 512MB to 1GB.
• See from the VM's Task Manager the new amount of memory available for the GOS.
• Hot-Add a new NIC, and configure it on the fly.
• Thin-Provision a new 10GB hard drive for a VM.
• Hot-Expand the new hard drive from 10GB to 20GB.
• Extend the volume live within the GOS using the "diskpart" tool.

I have the Storage vMotion & vCenter linked-mode recorded and will be publishing them this week. Stay tuned!

And finally some real action of the new amazing vSphere's Fault Tolerance. In this video we'll do the following in order:

• Verify that the FT logging is enabled on our network card.
• Enable the FT on one VM.
• Observe that the VM has two instances, the primary running on one ESX server, and the secondary running on a deferent ESX server.
• Demonstrate the "Record & Play", or to be acurate the "vLockStep" mechanism used on the FT enabled VM.
• Start a large file copy to the VM as a continuous operation in place throughout our fail-over process
• Start the fail-over process by resetting the ESX blade via the Dell admin console.
• Observe that the VM has been shifted to the secondary ESX server, and that the file copy is not interrupted.
• Observe that the FT has automatically chosen another ESX server to protect the VM with no intervention from our side.
• We'll check also the up-time of the VM after the fail over.
• And finally we'll perform the migration of the FT enabled VM in case of planned maintenance.

I hope you will find this video useful, and see the great benefit of the new Fault Tolerance feature in vSphere 4.

This is the third video in our vSphere journey. We'll do the following tasks in order:

• Add our Licenses in vCenter Server.
• Register our first ESX server in vCenter.
• Configure the VMkernel on the ESX server along with enabling the vMotion & FT.
• Configure the iSCSI software initiator and discover the shared LUNs on the SAN.
• Create an HA/DRS enabled Cluster.
• Add our three ESX servers to it.
• Import a Virtual Appliance to the cluster for testing.
• Test vMotion to ensure that the VMkernel is functioning properly.

And by that we set the stage for Fault Tolerance in the next video. I have it already recorded and I will do my best to produce it by tomorrow since it's a weekend over here.

One last thing to note: please bare with the interesting music that plays along with the video, I can't find my flash loops collection, so until I do, you may either mute the music or dance with it. It's really boring watching silent videos, besides, it's almost impossible not to fall asleep from them.

This is the second video in the vSphere4 series, we’ll install the complete set of the vCenter4 components and use a remote SQL server for hosting the vCenter Server & Update Manager DBs. The installation is fairly easy and straight forward, but it has a couple of interesting new features/enhancements.

Happy viewing!