SysAdmins Log

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