2010
07.22
So I just read this article from the Times on how IBM finally rolled out an updated mainframe system, the Z series. Now I know, everyone’s “moving to the cloud” these days, but calm down for a minute, it is after all, only my opinion. I do think that for certain applications having a more centralized system that does its dedicated job well is important (like in banking, as the article mentions), I can’t and won’t try to imagine a cloud-based banking infrastructure 
.
Here is the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/technology/22compute.html?_r=1&ref=technology
ESX admin from the top – part 2 (final part) is coming soon, don’t fret!
Sean
2010
07.06
Alright, so as promised, here are some links which could be useful to the everyday ESX admin.
Password Resets: http://blog.vmpros.nl/2009/01/06/vmwarechanging-the-root-password-on-esx-server/
As basic as this may seem, it is just something that we all need every once in a while.
Dealing with locked VM disk files: http://conshell.net/wiki/index.php/Recovery_of_Locked_VMDK
This problem, depending on how robust your power infrastructure is might not be as much of a problem, but in one of my jobs we had a large ESX cluster that was non-essential (or so they told me) and the power provider wasnt too reliable and when the hosts would fail, the vmdk files would lock because when you use vmfs 3 it doesnt deal well with hosts not shutting off and un-mounting from the file system (hence why NFS is nicer for DS’s in some cases), so I found that if rebooting the hosts properly didn’t fix the issue, rebuilding some of the more stubborn locked files was the way to go, before nuking the locked file.
Here is another link from vmware which offers a different technique for dealing with locked files as well, http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=10051
Hopefully these prove useful, they may not, but I have found them useful, so hopefully you will too.
Sean