Month: February 2011

  • Dear Vendors…

    I have to say one of my pet peeves is when vendors, and a lot seem to do it today, send emails or leave voicemails acting like we’ve known each other (often sounding like years) when we in fact haven’t even exchanged greetings before. I don’t know if that works for others, but for me it, well, creeps me out and frankly immediately makes me disinclined to work with you.

    A recent example (one of many sadly):

    I cannot “catch up with” someone I have never met and don’t pretend you’re “trying to reach” me when this is the first email I’ve received from you (ok, it is vaguely possible I’ve received another and “filed” it appropriately as well).

    Seriously, does this work with other potential customers? Because opening with deception does not seem like a way to start off on a good foot.

    Needless to say, I won’t be speaking to this particular vendor “soon”.


  • Converting VMware virtual disk to “eagerzeroedthick”

    Pretty simple from the console really:

    vmkfstools -d eagerzeroedthick -i <virtual-disk-source>.vmdk <virtual-disk-target>.vmdk

    Note that this will completely expand the size of the filesystem (ie: it will no longer be “thin”).

    I needed this not to convert a “thin” filesystem to “thick” filesystem, but a “thick” filesystem to a clusterable “thick” filesystem. The default of “zereodthick” for thick filesystem does zeroing as needed on the fly, whereas “eagerzeroedthick” zeros out beforehand (which takes longer). The former, “zeroedthick” isn’t compatible with clustered filesystems, or more particularly, the required setting of “SCSI Bus Sharing” to “Virtual” while “eagerzeroedthick” is.

    “eagerzeroedthick” corresponds to the vSphere Client setting when creating a hard disk of “Support clustering features such as Fault Tolerance”. It is incompatible with “Allocate and commit space on demand (Thin Provisioning)”.

    More about clustering on the same VMware machine (though aimed at Microsoft unfortunately) can be found here:

    http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3/r35u2/vi3_35_25_u2_mscs.pdf

    To note, renaming virtual disks is equally as simple via the CLI (which the vSphere Client will not allow):

    vmkfstools -E <original-virtual-disk>.vmdk <renamed-virtual-disk>.vmdk

    Note that in the case of any of the “thick” versions actually have two files which can be confusing, a file that doesn’t have “-flat” and one that does. In that case choose the one that lacks “-flat” for the operations and “vmkfstools” will automatically handle the “-flat” version as well.