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Over time the boot partition on a Windows Server 2003 installation might just turn out to be too small. There can be various reasons for this, but the fact remains that over time you will accumulate data on the boot drive that you didn't take account for when you set it up initially.

Luckily I run almost all of my servers in a VMware based virtualized environment, where it's easy to expand the the virtual disks. The problem is that Windows Server 2003 doesn't let you easily expand the boot volume, at least not without downtime. I've previously talked about using tools like GParted to expand the boot volume but there are easier ways to do it and prevent downtime at the same time!

All you need is love. No,wait, that's something else entirely! All you need is ExtPart. ExtPart is a lovely little 36KB tool that Dell has provided to expand partitions on Dell based servers and storage systems. It is a little known fact that ExtPart can do the job in any 32 bit Windows Server 2000 or 2003 based install (no 64 bit support, sadly), and in Server 2008 there are other methods of doing this.

Enough talk, lets get down to the business at hand.

1. Download ExtPart from the Dell download site
2. Expand your boot volume, either via the Virtual Infrastructure Client or via vmkfstools
3. Run ExtPart inside your VM to expand your boot volume to the new size

Thats it. The following screenshots outline the process very well, without having to guide you through each step. Have a look!

It can't get much simpler that this, honestly.

Hal Rottenberg's Managing VMWare Infrastructure with Windows PowerShell is now available as pre-order from ScriptingOutpost.com

I follow Hal on Twitter and find his PowerShell and VMware knowledge inspiring, hopefully his book will help me master the black art of PowerShell and help me in my day to day VMware Infrastructure management as well.

Go order now, I know I will.

The much anticipated new versions of VMware ESX Server, VVirtual Center and Consolidated Backup as now been made available for download by VMware.

The new build versions are:

• VMware ESX Server - Latest Version: 3.5 | 12/10/2007 | Build: 64607
• VMware VirtualCenter - Latest Version: 2.5 | 12/10/2007 | Build: 64201
• VMware Consolidated Backup - Latest Version: 1.1 | 12/10/2007 | Build: 64559

New features and improvements include

• Storage VMotion
• Update Manager
• Support for 200 hosts and 2000 virtual machines
• Support for 128GB RAM per host and for 64GB RAM per virtual machine
• Server consolidation advisor
• Distributed Power Management (DPM)
• Guest OS disaster recovery capability
• Provisioning across datacenters objects
• Support for SATA storage devices
• Support for VCB over iSCSI SANs
• Support for 10Gbit Ethernet network cards
• Support for TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) network cards
• Support for Jumbo Frames

Check out the release notes for more details and the updated VI feature list

I can't wait to get my infrastructure updated, and I'm really looking forward to playing with the new Update Manager and VCB over iSCSI

Some times you run across applications that makes your work as a system administrator that much easier, and last night VMTS Patch Manager really came to the rescue. Due to some problems encountered during the day, I had to reboot one of our ESX hosts and decided it would be a good time to do another patch run and get my ESX hosts updated.

Normally I've done patching the hard way (which by the way is way easier in ESX 3.x compared to 2.x), which basically consists of downloading the patches from VMware onto a http or ftp reposiitory, and then using esxupdate, from the host, to fetch the updates and apply them to the host. You also need to open up the builtin firewall and put your hosts in maintenance mode. If you want all the details, have a look at the Patch Management for ESX Server 3 PDF from VMWare. In itself this is a pretty straight forward job, but it does require that you keep track of the updates manually and apply them manually.

VMware will release a new VMware Update Manager with the new 3i and 3.5 versions, but for now there is no real automation tool provided with the stock Virtual Infrastructure 3 package. As is natural, many administrators deploy scripted solutions to manage the task of updating their hosts and have successfully been able to automate patch deployment that way, but there is a tool freely available that takes care of all this in one single package.

VMTS Patch Manager provides both a way to download all available patches into a local repository and then scan your hosts to see which patches are required. If there are any that needs to be deployed, it will take care of that for you as well. It can put your hosts in maintenance mode, do the required firewall changes and apply the patches. I successfully patched both our hosts, by using the patch manager, last night without any problems.

VMTS Patch Manager can also do upgrades like upgrading your ESX 3.0 hosts to the latest 3.0.2 version and then apply any patches that has been released since the 3.0.2 release. The tool itself works like any other Windows application, and it really does make the job of maintaining your ESX server patch levels current.

So, until ESX 3i and 3.5 is available, VMTS Patch Manager seems to be the ultimate way of maintaining your ESX host patches! Just remember to update your Virtual Center to the latest version before you attempt to upgrade your ESX version!

Thank you Massimiliano Daneri, your tool provides a great service that for now is missing from the core ESX product!

Richard Garsthagen over at run-virtual.com has published Hacking your ESX 3i Server. Great info there!