Some months ago I installed 15 new vSphere 6.0 hosts with local flash disks. After installation I configured the VMware Syslog Service at the vCenter appliance. Few weeks later the vSphere web-client shows some warnings about disk usage

Problem

Filesystem /dev/mapperlog_vg_log usage 100%, mounted on /storage/logs

 
Use this command to verify which disk is experiencing disk space issues:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Solution

As you can see the the /storage/logs mount point is located at VMDK5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edit de vCenter appliance virtual hardware, select disk Hard disk 5 and increase the provisioned size, in my case from 10 to 20 GB

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once the virtual disk has been increased, return to the SSH session and execute this command to automatically expand any logical volumes for which the physical volumes are increased:

vpxd_servicecfg storage lvm autogrow

 

 

 

 

 

When the grow operation is successful, you see output similar to:

VC_CFG_RESULT=0

 

Run this command to confirm that the virtual disk has been successfully grown:

df -h

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More information: VMware

Lots of VMware / Windows administrators can extend virtual disks on-the-fly in a few seconds, but what is the easiest way to shrink a / the (OS) volume?

In this post I’ll show a (simple) method how-to shrink the system disk size from a virtual machine from 60 to 40 GB.

 

In all cases, confirm the following before shrink the size of the virtual disk:

• All snapshots have been removed;
• The virtual machine is powered off;

How-to:

Install VMware Converter and connect you’re vCenter server running that specific virtual machine

– Start the VMware Converter by clicking “Convert machine”;
– Select source server (virtual machine on vSphere host);
– Select destination server (same vSphere host, new VM name);
– Select target datastore;- Options: select “Data to copy” and press Edit;

^ you can see the source volume (60 GB) and used space (23,45 GB)

Read more…

Last week I’ve converted a .VHD (Microsoft Virtual PC) to .VMDK for a customer with the application WinImage, the process was very easy.. a little how to:

WinImage 8.5: Download

 

Read more…

To prepare a SAN to SAN migration I need to list all virtual machines with RAW Device Mappings, I found a very nice script at Pastebin (I’ve this you’re script, please comment to receive the credits), the script:

$report = @()
$vms = Get-VM | Get-View
foreach($vm in $vms){
     foreach($dev in $vm.Config.Hardware.Device){
          if(($dev.gettype()).Name -eq "VirtualDisk"){
               if(($dev.Backing.CompatibilityMode -eq "physicalMode") -or
               ($dev.Backing.CompatibilityMode -eq "virtualMode")){
                    $row = "" | select VMName, VMHost, HDDeviceName, HDFileName, HDMode, HDsize, HDDisplayName
                    $row.VMName = $vm.Name
                    $esx = Get-View $vm.Runtime.Host
                    $row.VMHost = ($esx).Name
                    $row.HDDeviceName = $dev.Backing.DeviceName
                    $row.HDFileName = $dev.Backing.FileName
                    $row.HDMode = $dev.Backing.CompatibilityMode
                    $row.HDSize = $dev.CapacityInKB
                    $row.HDDisplayName = ($esx.Config.StorageDevice.ScsiLun | where {$_.Uuid -eq $dev.Backing.LunUuid}).DisplayName
                    $report += $row
               }
          }
     }
}
$report

Ps. the script can take a while to list…