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ESXi 5 really makes it easier to "properly" remove a LUN from hosts.

For those times you find yourself in a pinch and need some features you can't afford!

In-depth list of VMware snapshots, how they work, and how to fix errors with them in various ways.

"Thinware vBackup™ is an enterprise grade backup solution for virtual infrastructure that can be easily implemented in any environment." VMware virtual machine backup, similar to Veeam in concept but Free option (although much fewer features). May be useful in lab scenarios or very low-budget environments.

"Over the past month I have installed and tested almost every single tool on my previous blog post of A List of FREE VMware vSphere Tools." -Kendrick Coleman

"A physical server needs drivers to talk to it's hardware. A virtualized server, in essence, does the same thing. VMware presents new hardware to allow the virtual machine to talk to it's hypervisor. Think of the driver issue in a P2V migration like removing a video card and installing a new one. The drivers and hidden hardware are still there just in case you feel like popping the video card back in. A P2V will still have all of the old hardware in the virtual machine. Don't forget about services that physical servers used, namely HP server management services."

"Look no further. I've created a collaboration of, yet again, FREE TOOLS for virtual machines within your VMware environment. All of the tools in this package were pooled together for performing advanced tasks to optimize performance, reclaim lost space, and clean up your virtual machine. The goal of this project was to mount the ISO to your VM and run the scripts or tools that are packaged. Of course not all of these tools will run from a VM, but most can."

"This table contains a list of systems, motherboards, storage controllers and network cards that have been tested and found to work with ESX 4.x or ESXi 4.x Installable. Please check out the source column for a system you are considering using as some systems will include special steps to enable ESX / ESXi to run on that system or have other issues to overcome. None of these systems are supported by VMWare for running ESX."

Ultimate-P2V (fix-vmscsi) is a free plug-in that allows you to clone a physical machine to virtual machine - and perform the neccessary "system reconfiguration" required to make it bootable. Without this tool or a commerical P2V tool the virtual machine would just give a "blue screen of death"

Information about your virtual machines and ESX hosts

What's new in Veeam Backup & Replication v6

"Finally, and somewhat overdue, here is the vReference card updated for vSphere 4.1. At first glance it looks the same, but there was quite a few little additions here and there."

"So ... we can effectively back up the configuration of our ESXi hosts (- 10 minute changes worst case) simply by backing up the state tardisk, then if the worst happens we can restore this and have our ESXi host with complete configuration restored in a matter of minute.  Luckily PowerCLI makes this very easy for us, the below script can be run as a scheduled task and will backup the state tardisk as often as the scheduled task is run."