Creating a vCenter alert for newly created VM's

If your like me and you want to know when a VM is created so as to try and curb virtual server sprawl then you should setup a custom alert to let you know when a new VM is created.

I actually want to know if a VM is either created or deployed as either will take up resources and managing resources in a virtual environment is key.  I did a fair amount of googleing but didn't run across anything that was pertinent.  I did however come up with this and its so simple.

VCenter actually already has the alerts pre-canned for you in either ESXi 4.1 or 5.   Follow these steps:

1. Create a new alarm
2. General settings should be monitor virtual machines
1. Check radio button for Monitor for specific events
3. On the triggers tab
1. Add event for Deploying VM
2. Add event for Creating VM
4. On the Actions Tab
1. Send a notification email
2. Enter email address
3. Alert once for green to yellow
4. Alert once for yellow to green

Thats it!  Now you will have a big brother iron grip on newly created VM's!

Physical Network Card Failures on HP DL580

We were experiencing network failures on HP DL580 and DL980 servers.  This was happening across all OS's but it was very noticeable on our ESXi infrastructure.  After many hours of grepping logs I found a line that stated firmware hang and card reboot!

We swapped out the 365i and 365T cards for 375T and replaced the 365i with next gen 365i cards and things are much better!

Hard lesson but from now on I will never run the same vendor for both internal and PCI network cards!