vCentre – Northtech Consulting Limited

27 Jan 2013

vCenter and Memory metrics

VMwareResources, vCentre, VMware, vsphere

I have received an email today asking if I could explain the memory details that are in vCenter under the summary tab on each VM. Rather than reinvent the wheel I have taken a blog post from Duncan Epping over at www.yellow-bricks.com which I find explains it very well. It appears that there is a lot of confusion around this topic and that probably comes from the fact that some of the Performance Metrics are named similarly but don’t always refer to the same. Let’s start with “General”: (more…)

Update VMware tools without reboot

VMwarevCentre, VMware, vsphere

Whilst having some spare time over the Christmas period I decided to upgrade by VMware home lab to vSphere 5.1, and I found out that one of the new features is you can update the VMware tools without the requirement to reboot each Virtual Machine (VM). Now to some people this may be a small change but to me and everyone else that has hundreds of servers in their data centres this is a BIG plus because now we haven't got to worry about doing the update out-of-hours. Thanks VMware and Merry Christmas

Insufficient Video RAM

VMwarevCentre, vMotion, vsphere

I recieved a call today from a friend who was receiving an error message when he was vMotioning a server. The maximum resolution of the virtual machine will be limited to 1176 x865 at 16 bits per pixel. To use the confurable maximum resolution of 2360x1770 at 16 bits per pixel, increase the amount of video RAM allocated to this virtual machine by setting svga.vramSize="16708800" in the virtual's configuratio file The quickest way I have found to change this is to edit the VM's properties and change the video card to "Auto-detect video settings", one thing to remember is the VM must be powered off…