Many of our customers are upgrading to VMware vSphere 4 and typically one of the first new features they take advantage of is VM thin-provisioning. Because thin-provisioning permits Administrators to allocate more disk space to VM’s than the VMFS volume actually contains, it’s essential to learn to use the new vSphere Storage Views and to also configure appropriate alerts to warn you when a VMFS datastore begins running out of free space. I’ve found it useful to configure vCenter alerts send these types of alerts as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS">SMS</a> text messages to a cell phone since these are often read more quickly than emails.

Each cell phone carrier provides a way to send SMS messages to their cell phones via email. Here’s a handy list of the email formats for some common cell phone carriers:
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">T-Mobile: phonenumber@tmomail.net
Virgin Mobile: phonenumber@vmobl.com
Cingular: phonenumber@cingularme.com
Sprint: phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon: phonenumber@vtext.com
Nextel: phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com
US Cellular: phonenumber@email.uscc.net
SunCom: phonenumber@tms.suncom.com
Powertel: phonenumber@ptel.net
AT&amp;T: phonenumber@txt.att.net
Alltel: phonenumber@message.alltel.com
Metro PCS: phonenumber@MyMetroPcs.com

Replace phonenumber with the 10 digit cell phone number with no spaces or punctuation.

NOTE: Make sure your cell phone plan includes free text messages or you might have an unpleasant suprise when your cell phone bill arrives!