Sunday, June 7, 2009

PowerCLI Resources

VMware have just released a PowerCLI session from VMworld.

I was also alerted by the excellent VMreference site to the existence of a PowerCLI reference card which is equivalent of the VM reference Card.

VI Internals has a pretty decent introduction to PowerCLI.

Extending the Disk of a VM

Apparently the only safe way/time to extend the size of a virtual machine's disk(s) is when you do not have a snapshot of the disk.

Through the VIC, you are prevented from increasing the size of a vmdk file. When the VM is running all options are greyed out. Via the command line on the server, you can still enter the vmkfstools -X command.

However, according to VMware support, as soon as you enter that command on a disk that has a snapshot you've completely hosed your VM!

Better have a good backup! Preferably a recent one.

I'm glad to say I didn't discover this first hand. Some colleagues of mine did. I just had to clear up their mess. So it goes!

Well, that's that.