"Finally, and somewhat overdue, here is the vReference card updated for vSphere 4.1. At first glance it looks the same, but there was quite a few little additions here and there."
"Thinware vBackup™ is an enterprise grade backup solution for virtual infrastructure that can be easily implemented in any environment." VMware virtual machine backup, similar to Veeam in concept but Free option (although much fewer features). May be useful in lab scenarios or very low-budget environments.
"The vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) allows administrators and developers to run scripts and agents to manage ESX/ESXi and vCenter Server systems. vMA is a virtual machine that includes prepackaged software, a logging component, and an authentication component that supports non-interactive login."
"We are excited to announce the immediate availability of VM Import for Amazon EC2. VM Import enables you to easily import virtual machine images from your existing environment to Amazon EC2 instances. VM Import allows you to leverage your existing investments in the virtual machines that you have built to meet your IT security, configuration management, and compliance requirements by seamlessly bringing those virtual machines into Amazon EC2 as ready-to-use instances."
"This table contains a list of systems, motherboards, storage controllers and network cards that have been tested and found to work with ESX 4.x or ESXi 4.x Installable. Please check out the source column for a system you are considering using as some systems will include special steps to enable ESX / ESXi to run on that system or have other issues to overcome. None of these systems are supported by VMWare for running ESX."
"Over the past month I have installed and tested almost every single tool on my previous blog post of A List of FREE VMware vSphere Tools." -Kendrick Coleman
"A physical server needs drivers to talk to it's hardware. A virtualized server, in essence, does the same thing. VMware presents new hardware to allow the virtual machine to talk to it's hypervisor. Think of the driver issue in a P2V migration like removing a video card and installing a new one. The drivers and hidden hardware are still there just in case you feel like popping the video card back in. A P2V will still have all of the old hardware in the virtual machine. Don't forget about services that physical servers used, namely HP server management services."
"So ... we can effectively back up the configuration of our ESXi hosts (- 10 minute changes worst case) simply by backing up the state tardisk, then if the worst happens we can restore this and have our ESXi host with complete configuration restored in a matter of minute. Luckily PowerCLI makes this very easy for us, the below script can be run as a scheduled task and will backup the state tardisk as often as the scheduled task is run."
"...My confidence has now grown to the point where I’m deploying VMFS volumes for everything with no perceived impact in performance, but is there a performance hit when using VMFS? If so, by how much?"
"Look no further. I've created a collaboration of, yet again, FREE TOOLS for virtual machines within your VMware environment. All of the tools in this package were pooled together for performing advanced tasks to optimize performance, reclaim lost space, and clean up your virtual machine. The goal of this project was to mount the ISO to your VM and run the scripts or tools that are packaged. Of course not all of these tools will run from a VM, but most can."
Ultimate-P2V (fix-vmscsi) is a free plug-in that allows you to clone a physical machine to virtual machine – and perform the neccessary “system reconfiguration” required to make it bootable. Without this tool or a commerical P2V tool the virtual machine would just give a “blue screen of death”
In-depth list of VMware snapshots, how they work, and how to fix errors with them in various ways.
Also works with ESXi 5 to extend trial license.