Mike Hays - Virtualization, PowerShell, and more...

Here’s a very quick Quicktip.  Like most people, I run the vCenter Infrastructure Client (aka VirtualCenter Client, aka VIC) to manage Windows guest OSs.
To make this easier, I change the “scheme” for my mouse pointers from the default to 3D-Bronze in order to make it easier to tell if the VIC console of the guest [...]

Anyone who has used PowerShell is familiar with how it shows the current working directory in the prompt as below:
PS C:\Documents and Settings\Mike\PowerShell\Scripts>
This is all well and good until you’re knee deep in directories (or registry keys, or the structure of any another provider) and the prompt is taking up more than half of the [...]

It is sometimes necessary to cause VMware ESX 3.x to recreate its bootloader.   This is generally done by running the following command sequence:
esxcfg-boot -b
esxcfg-boot -p
esxcfg-boot -r
You might find that these commands run indefinitely on your ESX servers if you alias ‘cp’ or ‘mv’ to ‘cp -i’ or ‘mv -i’ respectively in your /root/.bashrc file.  The [...]

Here’s the scenario: You need to move a large number of ESX guest OSs from one datacenter to another.  To make things interesting, there isn’t enough bandwidth on the WAN to move the guest OSs on the wire or replicate the data, so it has to be out of band.  Also, you’re on a tight [...]