No matter how many Single Points of Failure (SPFs), no matter how small your "Failure Domain", no matter what you do to decrease the probability, one thing that is always still a possibility in the IT world is catastrophic failure.
Like getting an "all our VMs are down" call where you eventually find that every.single.vmx.file has been corrupted and is full of nulls. It's not what you want on your first day back from vacation. Or worse yet, during vacation.
These are the days you are glad you started learning PowerCLI by tweaking scripts you found in other blog posts like:
http://andrewmorgan.ie/2011/05/16/vmware-powercli-one-liners-simple-functions/
and http://damiankarlson.com/2010/09/06/vsphere-licensing-via-powercli/
So that you can collect detailed information on your how hosts and VMs are configured, what snapshots are out there, what licenses are in use where, etc.
I built several PowerCLI scripts that, at the very least, saved a lot of frustration but efforts like RVTools are massively wonderful. [Also note that it can be called from the command line, so you can make your data collection a scheduled task.]
At some point soon I plan to write a script that will generate a document for each VM, to make the rebuilding easier if/when needed again.
It's everything you need to put Humpty Dumpty (like the VMs that were P->Vd and have silly things like BusLogic Parallel SCSI controllers) back together again.
Having copies of the actual .vmx files isn't a bad idea either - http://communities.vmware.com/message/1674574
When you have your boss'-boss'-boss asking 'How long?', it's nice to be able to give an answer. It's even nicer when you can say that the first server will be up in 10 minutes.
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