VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘vmdk’

At the VMworld 2009 Vizioncore booth I discovered 3 new free tools from Vizioncore that all VI administrators, no matter which popular hypervisor platform you use, should know about. vConverter SC, vControl Multi-Hypervisor Management, and vOptimizer WasteFinder offer unique features that accomplish and automate common virtual environment administrative tasks. These products include tools for P2V and V2V migrations between multiple vendor platforms, a web based multi hypervisor management server, and virtual disk optimization through VMDK alignment and wasted storage scanning.

Vizioncore is banking on creating wider interest and adoption of its full product suite in the virtualization market, but for now administrators definitely come out the winners with these great tools at no cost. The free products mentioned in this post (as well as all of Vizioncore’s software) can be downloaded here.

I’ve summarized these utilities in the rest of this post. Read the rest of this entry »

New in the latest version of ESX 3.5 is an experimental Service Console script called the VMDK Recovery Tool. Since it’s Console based, it’s not available in ESXi. The Update 3 Release Notes say the following about it:

Experimental Support for the VMDK Recovery Tool — This release adds support for the VMDK Recovery tool, a script intended to help customers to recover VMFS/vmdk data stores from accidental deletion of VMFS/vmdk data store or physical disk corruption. For more information, see VMDK Recovery Tool (ESX 3.5 Update 3) ( KB 1007243).

Use the VMDK Recovery Tool to:

Create a “block list” of your VMDK files. The block list file is a plain text file that keeps a record of all VMDKs of the virtual machines.

Recover VMDK files if they become deleted, or if the VMFS datastore gets deleted or corrupted.

Undelete VMDKs? Recover corrupted or deleted VMFS data stores? Reading KB 1007243 a little further reveals you can back up and restore VMs too – either specify which one you want to back up or pick all the registered VMs on the host. The script asks you to specify the directory path to use for saving backups and the destination path for restoring from backups.

Sounds to me like this script could become a “super VCB” without the extra server requirements? It seems much simpler anyways. It will be interesting to see how this script is developed and exactly how much disk space the block list and backup files consume.