the birdhouse in my soul

A fresh install of RHEL6 contains several vSphere-ready components: the standard kernel package contains kernel modules for the optimized VMware virtual hardware (network, storage, and memory balloon driver). vmxnet3 vmw_pvscsi vmware_balloon and just like in earlier RHEL releases, there's drivers for the VMware graphics card and the mouse driver: xorg-x11-drv-vmware xorg-x11-drv-vmmouse Especially the built-in network and storage drivers will make life easier for RHEL admins in vSphere environments. That's great news ofcourse, but I'd like to stress that this is not equivalent to a full VMware Tools install, which would include extras such as shutdown/reboot/freeze/resume scripts, IP address display in the vSphere client, etc.

VMware pre-compiles the VMware tools for selected OS kernels. The stock RHEL kernels are included, but not the intermediate updates. If you can live with that, you can simply add the VMware tools YUM repository: # cd /etc/yum.repos.d/ # wget http://bert.debruijn.be/linux-stuff/vmwaretools.repo and download the VMware RPM signing key # cd /etc/pki/rpm-gpg # wget http://packages.vmware.com/tools/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-KEY.pub Then install the tools packages: # yum install vmware-tools-nox or # yum install vmware-tools vCenter will report the tools version as "Unmanaged" rather than "OK", but you have heartbeat (so HA and alarms can detect guest OS crashes), balloon driver, etc.

Most Linux system-administrators are well aware of the benefits of LVM. With online resizing of filesystems and migration of data from one disk to another, it's fantastic. But don't assume that your system will do everything for you. If your system has one disk, that you used as a physical volume (PV) in a volume group (VG), where your root partition is stored as a logical volume (LV), you can easily add a new disk. Add the disk physically, boot up, use pvcreate and vgextend to include the new disk in the existing volume group. Just don't reboot, at least, not yet ! Your system requires a manual rebuild of its initial ram disk /sbin/mkinitrd -f /boot/initrd-2.6.18-92.1.10.el5.img 2.6.18-92.1.10.el5 If you forget to do this, your system will not boot, because it won't find all the components necessary to activate the VG it needs to access the root filesystem. Symptoms: kernel loads, initrd loads, root filesystem can't be mounted because the volume group doesn't e...

Are you still using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, or CentOS 2.1 ? Then this news is of great importance to you: planned End-Of-Life for these products is approaching ! After May 2009, there will be no more security updates for RHEL 2.1, nor support from Red Hat. It's not really news , as the lifecycle of RHEL products has always been clearly announced and published . If you missed all that, this is the time to start planning an upgrade. Your Red Hat subscription gives you the right to use the newer versions of RHEL, so upgrading is all you need to do. Need help planning an upgrade to RHEL 3, 4 or 5 ? I can recommend some experienced consultants ! ;-)