there is a fine line between agile and fragile
Maish Saidel-Keesing has revisited his previous post "Hot Add and "Need have have"" where he (like I did) pokes some fun at a rather strange error message in ESXi 4.0. Now that Update 1 is out, Maish tries again, this time with better results.
Read the whole post: "Need have have" - revisited.
I'm glad to say we don't need have have any more!
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.
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.
Nice little error message shown when trying to hot add a new HDD to a VM running on ESXi 4.0.
How much need have have do you need?
Clearly I'm not the first to notice this rather peculiar wording in ESXi 4. Maish Saidel-Keesing posted the same screenshot back in May 2009 in his post called Hot Add and "Need have have".
Read that post instead of mine, it also highlights what ESXi 4 is missing as well as poorly worded error messages.
Funny thing is that I can even remember reading Maish post back when it was published, but I don't remember seeing that weird error message. Oh well. :)
Thanks to Jase McCarty for pointing this out to me.
vmwarewolf.com
If you happen to search Google for one of the following phrases you might expect Google to return a list of official VMware Knowledgebase articles on the topic.
- crash debug screen
- machine crash screen
- ESX Server PSOD
- Purple screen crash report
- Decode purple screen error
I know this is a direct copy of some of that article, but it's an attempt to help out getting ESX Server PSOD ranked in Google. I'm sure I'll be forgiven for the verbatim copy/paste job.
Cody Bunch over at professionalvmware.com has started a series of posts called "The Best Tools You Didn’t Know You Needed". So far Cody has featured GParted and TeraCopy, both truly great tools to have in your virtual or non-virtual tool-belt.
I have my own series of posts outlined, still in draft mode though, that I plan to publish within the next week or so and thankfully they highlight different tools than the ones already covered by Cody in his series.
Seems like I need to speed up the publishing of my posts now! I'm sure there are other great (free) tools out there that are missing the recognition they deserve.
Can you think of any? Any freebie tools that make your day as a (virtual) sysadmin easier?
Leave a comment, I'd love to hear from you!