Today I did my presentation about performance troubleshooting and it was great. I had a lot of fun and I had great feedback. I've decided to put the presentation online. So here 'ya go:

By the way - last question from the audience was: "What tool did I use to create that presentation?". Well it's Prezi, check it out on: http://prezi.com. This presentation has over 90 images/movie clips and takes over 140 clicks. The preps took me a couple of days (creating the lap, some of the pictures), and creating the actual presentation including the maps took 16 hours. The presentation itself took 55 minutes and I still wasn't able to tell you everything about this great topic.

By the way - I was tipped by Aleks Nikolić from http://www.virtualistic.nl for using Prezi - thanks mate! Make sure you check his website - he has great info on it.

While giving out batches, talking to people, shacking hands, listening to the excellent opening keynote from Viktor van den Berg, Richard Garsthagen, shooting pictures I do have some time to blog. It's the 5th time this event takes place. Quite cool! Richard is doing an excellent presentation now. To get an impression, check my photo's online: http://www.jume.nu/vmug. Have fun clicking through them - check back later soon.

It's the second time in a short period where I've found a VM not starting and reporting as (inaccessible). I do not know why this happens, but I just found a quick solution for it (instead of creating a new VM using existing disk). The only thing you need to do is browse the datastore and remove the .vmxf file. Problem solved.

The vmxf isn't that important and gets recreated. It hold some insignificant stuff in xml format:

cat w30008.vmxf
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Foundry>
<VM>
<VMId type="string">52 7e f4 7e f4 f1 1c d8-59 b3 2c d5 76 0d 0a 45</VMId>
<ClientMetaData>
<clientMetaDataAttributes/>
<HistoryEventList/></ClientMetaData>
<vmxPathName type="string">w30008.vmx</vmxPathName></VM></Foundry>

Another thing I'm prepping is my photo website. I intend to shoot quite a lot of pictures during the VMUG event - 11th of December. Add a bookmark to your browser and check the 11th regularly: http://www.jume.nu/VMUG

Just one week to go...

I've been very busy lately preparing the VMUG event 11th December. Creating a presentation though is quite time consuming. An other thing which is quite time consuming is creating a demo/test environment to create screenshots, test the theories, etc.

A good thing is everything is quite in my head - al I need to do is put it to paper.

So what's the use of this blog-post you might ask. Well, on my HP ML100 G5's I created 4 ESXi based hosts, where the console is assigned an IP address using DHCP. I registered the MAC address in my Windows 2003 DHCP server and the design works like a charm. I've shutdown and started my servers quite regularly (shutting them down at the evening). AND the thing that also works is the update using update manager: so DHCP enabled ESXi servers starts like a charm, works like a charm, updates like a charm.

Oh yeah, the only thing left to do is update the VMware Tools in all my 15 VMs...

Cheers