I’ve recently encountered a problem in my lab environment while trying to power on a virtual machine (let’s call it TheVM in this post):

AH! It’s PSOD! Let’s all run around and scream in terror as the apocalypse is upon us! Well, not really…

Virtualization is all around us these days. In the world full of clouds, hypervisors, remote desktops and many, many more “virtual” stuff, it’s very important to keep in mind how it all started. Even though it might seem like virtualization picked up only mere few years ago, it was actually around for over 50 years now! Granted, that ancient technology was nearly completely different from what we have now, but isn’t that the case with every branch of IT? Get yourself a nice cup of coffee and find a comfortable chair to sit on – this post will be one of the bigger ones.

Expanding a VMFS partition seems like an easy task – most of the time all we need to do is go to the storage tab of an ESXi host and use the “Increase Capacity” wizard…

Ah, command line. You might love it or hate it, but at the end of the day – there’s nothing you can do really to get around it. Sometimes you just have to use it and no GUI or fancy-dancy wizard will help you out. In my personal opinion, CLI/shell/SSH will always be a superior method of controlling anything in IT…