How to extend the OS partition of a Virtual Machine Drive (VMDK) if it contains 2 or more partitions

Before we begin, this is all done with VMWare ESX 3.5 and you need to have an ISO of GParted.

Last night I was given the task to extend the Operating System (C:) drives of a few virtual machines because we ran out of room for Windows patching. This is a relatively easy task. Shutdown the VM, extend the disc a few GB under edit settings of the VI Client, boot into GParted, resize, apply, and reboot. Bam, you're done. Well, let me throw this scenario at you. Someone before you did a P2V (Physical to Virtual) of a server that had 2 physical hard drives and during the process didn't hit that little checkmark to create 2 seperate virtual hard drives (VMDKs). Instead, you are left with one large hard drive with 2 partitions. Windows still functions as it did when it was physical, having 2 seperate hard drives, for this instance we will say C: & E:. Since the Operating System partition is at the beginning of the drive, you can't move it to the end and extend it because that would screw up the MBR (Master boot record).

Mounting EMC's Checkpoints / SnapSure as a file-level recovery solution for VMware ESX Virtual Machines when using NFS Datastores

 **Edit** 10/21/2009 - This is not solely for VMs running on NFS Datastores. This can be VMs running on iSCSI too. You just have to export the snapshot as a NFS volume to mount it inside a linux box

**EDIT** 1/15/2010 - Collin MacMillan over at http://blog.solori.net- brought up a very good point. How can you export an ISCSI VMFS to a NFS datastore? The Answer is: I DON'T KNOW =(. I no longer have my celerra, so if anyone can test and let me know, I will be sure to update the post. So if you're running iSCSI, this is YMMV. Thanks Collin!

I'm really getting bad at these long titles. On to the good stuff

A little background on what I am running to see if it will suit your environment's needs. I currently have 7 ESX Servers running version 3.5 and an EMC NS40 Celerra Version running version 5.3.36. My environment runs solely on NFS and so far this is the best option I've seen. You will need a linux box, in this case I created a virtual machine of Kubuntu Desktop Intrepid Ibex 8.10. That being said let's continue.

Basically, this is how it works. Using the Celerra Manager we will create a schedule of checkpoints for a file system. This is done on the back end of the file system, so unlike many backup solutions, this won't put any stress on the ESX hosts. Using some Linux mount commands, we can mount the snapshots/checkpoints and mount a virtual machine's hard drive. This solution is free, won't be needing any additional servers or bigger storage, can be managed internally, and won't be dependent on 3rd parties.

How to fix a frozen Virtual Machine that is stuck at 95% or timed out after trying to power off or restart

that's quite the catchy title eh? Well I couldn't think of any other way to put it.

I have had this problem 3 times now so hopefully I'll blog about this to potentialy save other people some more time

Symptoms: Your virtual machine has frozen. You open up the console and you get no mouse movement, it's literally frozen. It will not respond to ping requests, RDP, anything.

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UPDATE*** 10/15/2009** THIS METHOD WORKS FOR ESX3.5. HAVE NOT TESTED ON VSPHERE. THIS WILL NOT WORK ON ESXi 4

"@LeGrandMeaulnes @KendrickColeman So you may want to make a note ... those steps don't work in ESXi 4. No vmware-cmd, nothing useful in /proc."

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Winter Storm '09

So this has been 2 semi-horrible weeks. 

It all started last Tuesday, 01/27/09. The storm approaches. You know it's going to be a bad storm when the cities 2nd largest employer, Humana, has called off operations. Everything goes fine for the rest of the day and night

Bad karma: we can't find that page!

You asked for http://kendrickcoleman.com/index.php/Page-34.html, but despite our computers looking very hard, we could not find it. What happened ?

• the link you clicked to arrive here has a typo in it
• or somehow we removed that page, or gave it another name
• or, quite unlikely for sure, maybe you typed it yourself and there was a little mistake ?

It's not the end of everything though : you may be interested in the following pages on our site:

• Page-34.html
• Search/Page-3.html
• Search/Page-4.html
• Search/Page-30.html
• Search/Page-31.html

I miss my old fraternity. I really had some of the best times of my life at Kappa Sigma. About 3 days ago, word spread like wildfire that the house was deemed unsafe to occupy. It truly is a sad day, but anyone that has lived there in the past 30 years knows that the lodge was bound for it. It's been a long time coming and now something needs to be done. I hope that the young men that hold the future of my old fraternity get the ball rolling to get a new house (something that has been on the plate for 10 years now). If you're an old alumni reading this, come to Lexington in the spring for the Alumni Banquet. I went last year and had an amazing time, you can see for yourself the fraternity is as strong as ever and will only continue to grow with your support.

Beta-Nu

 AEKDB

To watch WKYT video click the read more button..

 http://wkyt.videogenesis.net/watch?v=3769

The Proper Way To Mount NFS Filesystems with EMC Celerra

We are moving our production VMs from iSCSI to NFS data stores in our ESX environment because of replication issues. We found out that to replicate a 1TB Lun with iSCSI, you need to have 4.4x the amount of space. You have to have your 1TB Lun sitting inside a 2.2TB Filesystem (because to replicate an iSCSI Lun it uses 120% overhead), then you also need 2.2TB sitting on the receiving end. We found that to be ridiculous because of how much it costs for a single drive. We are moving towards NFS because to replicate an NFS Filesystem is uses very little overhead. Thus, we are regaining TONS of space. After creating a few NFS Filesystems and running production VMs on them, I think I found the proper way to create the NFS shares.

After relentless searching on the tubes, I found no step-by-step guides on how to setup SSH on nortel switches, Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 5520 to be exact.  After contacting Nortel personally I have finaly found the solution and it wasn't difficult to say the least