ESX3 reference card / cheat sheet

[forbes]

Hi everyone,

I have started to create an ESX3 reference card (or what some people call a "cheat sheet"). It's not finished yet, but I wanted to get some feedback before I go too far with it.

I see it's general purpose is for a Sys Admin (like me) who can't remember everything at 2am in the server room. However, it would probably be useful for anyone studying for their VCP or for Technical Architect types who need to know how much RAM a VM can be allocated.

Anyway, have a look over here and let me know what you think, by posting a reply in this thread:

Forbes

Message was edited by: forbes

Typo mistakes

[jose_maria_gonz]

Great stuff,

I wonder if it would make sense to have a section in the document on DR solutions, alternatives, software availalbe for DR, etc. as an easy guide for DR solutions!?

rgds,

J.

[forbes]

Hi,

I think it would be great to include something like this, unfortunately I am struggling to squeeze everything in at the moment.

Chapter 10 of their new VI3 book has some excellent advice for DR, and this chapter is available as a free download from http://www.vi3book.com/

Forbes Guthrie

[forbes]

Just to give you all a bit of an update. I'm pretty busy with my move to Vancouver, but I have been plugging away on things. Desperately trying to squeeze in a few more lines in the Backup/Storage/Resources page, but things are tight. I'm not that far away from publishing 1.0, but I'm off tonight for the next few weeks on holiday, before I arrive in Vancouver. Hopefully I should publish this soon though. My apologies if I don't reply to any emails for a few days, as I might not be anywhere near an internet connnection.

Forbes Guthrie

[BryanMcC]

This is great.. I am telling all of my geek friends at the next LAN party

Excellent work.

Help me help you by scoring points...

[VampyreUK]

Hi Forbes,

That looks really good ... it even looks useful from an exam perspective

Kyu

[ExCon]

Does anyone have a mirror for this? I've been trying to get to this site for about a week with no luck...

Thanks!

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Are you just looking for a copy of the reference PDF from {color:#3366cc}http://www.vmreference.com{color} ?

[ExCon]

Yup, that's what I'm looking for.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

- this is the current link and it seems OK. I have attached a copy of it.

Forbes, I hope you don't mind that.

[ExCon]

Perfect, thanks!

[Deb0]

Forbes, you rock. Nicely done! I'm taking my exam tomorrow, but this will be hanging in my cube.

[forbes]

Just to let you all know, I've uploaded version 1.0.

Enjoy.

Forbes Guthrie

[Engelsman]

Thank you!

[forbes]

Hi,

version 1.1 is now available.

Forbes Guthrie

[griegomiami]

Excellent guide. Thanks!

[forbes]

Hi,

Just to let you know, I've moved my website to vReference.com

Forbes Guthrie

[bluedrake]

Heya nice document.... can see this helping out alot in the future Though is there anyways that i can print this out page by page... in otherwords the networking info on one page, and storage info on one page and so on

[emcclend]

Forbes,

Great document!!! This will really come in handy. I did have a question regarding the MSCS section. For cluster accross boxes, it says Virtual RDM = Yes & Physical RDM = Not Recommended. I thought it was the other way around in which the Physical mode was the recommended way. I currently have 2 MSCS setup and they both are set to physical mode as I thought you could not use virtual mode for MSCS across boxes. With this I know I loose the ability for snapshots and VCB imaging, but I thought that was the recommended way. However, please correct me if I'm wrong.

[forbes]

Hi Ed,

This is a very confusing area, because of the crossover in terminologies. So confusing I just wrote a blog post for you on the subject:

Hope this answers your question.

Forbes Guthrie

[emcclend]

Forbes,

Thanks for the blog. It really helps. It looks like when doing MSCS it all depends on weather you are doing CIB or CAB and that will determine if you should use physical or virtual compatibility mode. So far with our 2 MSCS we are doing CAB and they are set to physical mode and seems to be working fine. To me, setting up a MSCS in a VMware environment is just a redundant system on an already redundant system so you further minimize the downtime. For example if one of our MSCS servers goes down or just needs to be rebooted, to the users, nothing changes (minimum downtime when the cluster fails over). Even with the confusion on how to setup it up, I think a MSCS in a VMware environment is great, but should be using sparingly.