Vsphere on Evan Hoffman

Use PowerShell to disconnect the CDROMs from all VMs in vCenter

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:59:36 +0000

Recently I was moving all VMs from one NFS datastore to another so we could destroy the old volume. Storage vMotion took care of this for the most part, but even after moving the files, vCenter still showed that the VMs were using the old datastore. It turned out this was due to the VMs having mounted ISOs on that datastore. The solution was to eject/unmount the CDrom, but I didn’t want to do “Edit Settings…” and manually remove the CDrom for 200+ VMs.

VMWare Tools Compatibility Matrix

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:15:22 +0000

Question: If I install the latest version of VMWare Tools on a guest, what kind of compatibility do I get when I vMotion to an older version of ESX? In other words, is VMware Tools backwards compatible with older versions of ESX/ESXi?

Answer: Yes, it’s backwards compatible. From this tool:

VMWare 5's new licensing model.

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 10:20:56 +0000

After reading up on the new VMware licensing&pricing model I understand the uproar. Limiting vRAM is a reasonable constraint, but 32GB per socket for Enterprise? 48 GB for “Enterprise Plus”? If you have a dual CPU server with 144 GB (easily configurable last year), with 4.1 you’d only need 2 enterprise licenses to use all 144 GB, since in 4.1 an “Enterprise” license covered 1 CPU (up to 6 cores) and up to 256 GB memory on the host.

Migrating vCenter 4.0 to 4.1 (part 1)

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 22:28:12 +0000

When vSphere 4.1 was released earlier this year, I was mildly excited. Our ESX servers are still running 4.0.0 and I had been planning to upgrade to 4.0u1 for a while. When 4.1 came out it seemed to have vindicated my procrastination: now I could just upgrade to 4.1 and take advantage of whatever new features there were (I read something about memory compression… whatever). I assumed the upgrade procedure for vCenter itself would be pretty simple: uninstall 4.0 and install 4.1. Well, it turns out that’s not the case! I sat down one day to create my game plan for the upgrade and right away I learned this was going to be a lot more work than I’d guessed. From VMware’s KB:

vCenter: Error parsing the server "(server IP)" "clients.xml" file

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:18:59 +0000

I got the above error today after running Windows Update on my XP VM a few days ago. A quick search showed that the error is caused by a Microsoft update to the .NET framework. To resolve it, remove update KB980773 (Add/Remove programs, make sure “Show Updates” is checked; KB980773 is under “Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 2”). I removed it and was able to log in without problems.

vCenter: Error parsing the server "(server IP)" "clients.xml" file

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:18:59 +0000