As most of you know and probably experienced from time to time: when a Virtual Machine’s CD-drive is connected to an ISO-file on one of your Datastores or even connected to the physical drive of your ESX-host the migration due VMotion of a Virtual Machine will not work.

Normally this isn’t really a problem except if you put a ESX-host in Maintenance mode and Virtual Center will simply not tell you why the Maintenance mode process is hanging or even giving a time-out after 15 minutes for no obvious reason. Most of the times it’s a Virtual Machine which has a CD-drive connected to an ISO file. A waste of time if you ask me.

So to prevent this from happening I’ve written a simple PowerShell oneliner/script disconnect these CD-drives from the ISO-files or from the physical drives and set them to Client-drives which is ok for VMotion:

(Get-VM -Location  Get-VMHost "your.esx.host")) | `
ForEach ( $_ ) { Get-CDDrive $_ | `
Where { $_.IsoPath.Length -gt 0 -OR $_.HostDevice.Length -gt 0 } | `
Set-CDDrive -NoMedia -Confirm:$False }

Instead of executing this just on one host you can also execute this for your entire cluster:

(Get-VM -Location  Get-Cluster "Your Cluster Name")) | `
ForEach ( $_ ) { Get-CDDrive $_ | `
Where { $_.IsoPath.Length -gt 0 -OR $_.HostDevice.Length -gt 0 } | `
Set-CDDrive -NoMedia -Confirm:$False }

Or ofcourse, by Datacenter:

(Get-VM -Location  Get-Datacenter "Your Datacenter Name")) | `
ForEach ( $_ ) { Get-CDDrive $_ | `
Where { $_.IsoPath.Length -gt 0 -OR $_.HostDevice.Length -gt 0 } | `
Set-CDDrive -NoMedia -Confirm:$False }

It’s as easy as that, now there will be no Virtual Machine interrupting your VMotions anymore and you can put your ESX hosts in maintenance mode without any problems

Cheers!

Hi Everyone!

Welcome to my first blog post on my own blog page. This finally gives me the opportunity to write a bit more and add a bit more imagery than I can do on just Twitter. Now that being said, let’s get to where this post is about

Microsoft finally release the first Beta of Visual Studio 2010. Now I’m not a fulltime developer, but I enjoy to develop a thing or two every now and then. Besides that I really love to see what’s new in new versions.
So I downloaded the ISO-image from Microsoft’s MSDN and I started instaling it on my Windows 7 RC installation. The installation is no other than 2008 except the only difference is that it starts installing the Beta version of the .NET 4.0 Framework which I suppose should offer a bit more features than 3.5 did.

After the installation -and the inevitable reboot- I ran Visual Studio 2010 and configured the environment for Visual C# usage, simply because that’s the language I’ll be developing in

Read more