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I was reading the old vmblog.com today and ran across a new tool that appears useful. I’m going to be upgrading from 3.0.2 -> 3.5 soon and I can see an immediate use for this tool. RVTools can be used to read the vmware tools version installed on all your Vmware guest servers if you point the tool at your Virtual Center server. There are a few other fields that are brought down as well. I use the notes field to populate backup information for the guest and that came down nicely with the tool.

After you read the version installed you can even select which VM’s if any you would like to upgrade which looks very convenient. Here’s the post I read…

http://vmblog.com/archive/2008/05/12/3rd-party-rvtools-for-vmware-updated-to-version-1-1.aspx

or go to the horse’s mouth right here:

http://rvtools.deveij.com/

After a year of service the 3 685 c class blades that I work with have served us well.  They started as Dual Proc AMD 8216 (dual core 2.4ghz) with 16gb of ram.  In order to expand the virtualization in our environment we decided to double the resources in each of the blades by adding 2 more procs and 16gb of ram.  I added the ram last week, but because of limitations in the system bus you need to have all 4 procs installed before the other 8 dimm banks are activiated.

Steps involved to upgrade procs & memory:

1. Add new licenses from vmware (esx is licensed by every 2 physical procs/sockets)
2. Login to Virtual Center and put host in maintenance mode.
3. This should vmotion all virtual machines from that host to other running hosts.
4. Shutdown host
5. Carefully install cpus and ram
6. Start server (will reboot once after starting)
7. Upgrade complete with ZERO downtime in the middle of the day.
8. 685c blades are now 4 cpu, 8 core and 32gb ram and ready for some more action.