As the title is speaking for itself, it is quite clear that today, I am going to discuss various methods to open and close firewall ports on ESXi hosts. It is useless to consider whether configuring firewall rules is harmful or not since every admin once in a while meets the necessity of fine-tuning network to distribute access rights. So, you ought to know all the tools at your disposal one way or another.
While extending a VMDK file is a fairly easy task that can be performed right in Disk Manager, shrinking a virtual disk is a bit tricky. And, you need to be really careful because unless done properly, reducing virtual disk size may cause data loss! Sure, you can just use VMware Converter to make a VMDK smaller, but, for my money, it is always better to have a script at hand. In this article, I’ll discuss how to shrink virtual disks with 2 simple PowerShell scripts.
Having a disaster recovery site is a must for any company. That’s why I wrote an article some time ago on how to set up Site Recovery Manager (SRM) so that it allows for creating a disaster recovery site. Today, I describe how you can actually create that site and migrate your VMs from the main site there.
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager has been introduced back in 2011. It is a VMware vCenter plug-in for disaster recovery site configuration and management. It also allows migrating to that site at the moment of need or during planned migrations. In other words, SRM ensures shortest services downtime if something goes wrong at your main site. Please, don’t count on that thing that much since there will be insignificant time losses anyway.
Building a virtualized environment with VMware Workstation is a bit different from the scenario discussed before. Today, I use VMware Workstation 15 Pro – a virtualization platform that supports hypervisor virtualization and allows administrating small VMware infrastructures. Yes, Workstation is a vCenter-like platform, but it has rather limited functionality. Anyway, it allows building a vSphere lab for free! This being said, the solution is good for this article.