Yeah the title explains it all. I am neck deep at work in a major top level executive buy-in for largley a 'virtualization-first' strategy where a major part of this initiative will be a Data Center consolidation effort involving roughly 3000+ VM's to migrate and P2V into new Virtual Infrastructure we are architecting now. The tool of choice for conversion/migration/P2V's whatever you want to refer to them as is the typically stellar PlateSpin product.

Ok, so this seems to be a popular topic and it's always fun to hear about what others are using out there to power their home ESX/Virtualization labs. I kind of come from the same school of thought that Chad Sakac over at virtualgeek does in the sense that I honestly and passionately believe that if you are going to be serious about Virtualization then you really do need to invest in building out a home lab. On another note what better way to show your faith in a technology than to 'eat the dogfood' if you believe in it right?

Whew, I had to reach deep back to work I had performed in another life before I saw the light and crossed over to the dark side (kidding) of VMware so this is almost two years ago that this video was recorded in my lab at work. This is a high level overview and video demo of a pretty raw what I will call 'xenmotion' capability when Xen was still quite immature and there were no GUI wrappers to initiate a Xenmotion type operation. This was executed with a Xen 3.2 release under a RHEL5 (actually CentOS5) Xen hypervisor using IBM HS-21 blades.

These topics have already been paid more than enough justice in other prominent virt bloggers posts so it doesn't seem right reinventing the wheel. Without further ado I present to you everything you ever wanted to know about Resignaturing VMFS volumes.

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/212852
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2008/12/11/enableresignature-andor-disallow...
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/03/13/vmfs-recognized-as-a-snapshot-wh...

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/09/a-multivendor-post-o...
http://goingvirtual.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/vsphere-4-0-with-software-i...

Installing VMware ESXi on a USB memory stick

First fetch the latest VMware ESXi from www.vmware.com. Next you need a 1 GB or larger USB memory stick. Make sure the stick (or any partition from it) is not mounted before executing the following commands.

# Set these to match your USB memory stick and the latest VMware ESXi version
export USB=/dev/sdc
export VER=4.0.0.Update01
export BLD=208167

# Make sure the stick is not mounted
df -h | grep ${USB}
sudo umount /media/Hypervisor0
sudo umount /media/Hypervisor1
sudo umount /media/Hypervisor2
sudo umount /media/Hypervisor3

Duncan over at yellow-bricks has a great series called 'ESXi Lessons Learned' where essentially he posts his findings/gotchas/nuiances/unique traits of working with and implementing ESXi. One part of his series discussed losing very low level capabilities such as a very badly hung/non-responsive VM that is not responding to the VIC/vSphere client or other typically used 3rd party mgmt tools (think RCLI/vMA/vSphere, VI Toolkit, vSphere CLI). (read more on this later)

Aligning the disk