vcenter

I often talk to people who don't understand what VMware snapshots are for and how they work. Common bad practices include using them as a backup technique, or applying them for the long term when applying patches. I hope that the following article might be useful to explain how snapshots work in vSphere. Part 1 of this article deliberately avoids showing you how the vSphere GUI works. I'll talk about the hows and whys in this part and show you how to apply this sensibly to a real VM in part 2.

When the vCentre Windows service starts, it tries to connect to its database. If the database is ready, then that's fine. If the database isn't properly started, then vCentre fails. Unfortunately,this is the usual case when you install the SQL database and vCentre on the same operating system. You reboot vCentre and it fails to start up automatically; you have to go and start the 'Virtual Center' service yourself. That's just rubbish.