It appears that when I did my site re-design a while back, I left out a few key blog posts.  I was kindly reminded today, that my CBT Tracker post no longer exists, so I've decided to bring it back from the dead, as I was under the impression many people found high value in understanding data growth patterns of individual VMs in their environment.

I took it as a personal challenge this week to leverage PowerShell, PowerCLI and the vSphere API to track the amount of data that changes in a VM over a regular interval window. It turns out VMware does make it quite simple to query what blocks in a VMDK file have changed and what the length of data is as long as you know how to structure the API call.

Attachments:

CBT_Tracker.ps1.zip

[Zip File containing the CBT Tracker script PS1 File]

2 Kb

Earlier I posted an article that talked about what happens on an ESX Server when a virtual machine has a memory limit set lower than the amount of memory assigned to that virtual machine.  Sound confusing?  If so, head over and read the original blog post.

The short version is that the situation is simply not good, and has major performance implications across the ESX Host, and potentially across the whole infrastructure.  Today, I want to show how you can simply identify and resolve this significant VMware Infrastructure issue using some simple PowerShell commands.