In this article I would like to share a few ideas on how to setup a lab environment for vSphere. When I deliver VMware-training it is a frequently asked question by my students how they could run the software in their own lab-environment. For those who own multiple physical servers on which they can run ESXi it is not too difficult. But when your resources are limited you might need to look at other possibilities.
If you are using a Linux-based pc or Mac OS X and want to manage a vSphere-environment then you might ask yourself the question if there is a native OS-version of the vSphere Client available for your platform.
The short answer is: no.
When you don't have hardware that supports running ESXi and you want to setup this OS for testing or educational purposes then installing it in a VMware Workstation virtual machine allows you to run the OS on generic hardware. This article explains how to do this. It is based on VMware Workstation version 10 and ESXi version 5.5. Doing this is also know as running a nested hypervisor because it runs on another virtualization technology.
When you have created an ESXi environment and want to work with features such as vMotion and High Availability you will need shared storage in your environment. Openfiler is a good choice to setup a storage appliance to provide shared storage with NFS or iSCSI.
This article will guide you through the setup of VMware Workstation and the process of creating your first virtual machine. This article is based on VMware Workstation 10, the most recent version at the time of writing, November 2013.
The Horizon View Portal page for the connection server has changed throughout the different versions. This article describes how to modify the behavior of the portal for version 5.3. How to modify the HTML Access enabled portal with Horizon View 5.2 is described in another article. The portal described here is
The Horizon View Portal page for the connection server has changed throughout the different versions. This article describes how to modify the behavior of the portal for version 5.x or 6.x when you have installed the HTML Access feature. When you don't have that additional feature installed then you have the 'default' portal.
In this article I have described how to get started with vCloud Director by using the VCD appliance. A regular installation would require setup of RedHat Enterprise Linux or CentOS as supported OS and other components such as an Oracle or MS SQL database server. These resources are not available to everyone so therefor setting up your first vCloud deployment is much easier by using the appliance. It works perfectly for getting to know vCloud Director and for proof-of-concepts.
The prerequisites for this article are:
This article describes how to install the vShield Manager appliance for use with vCloud Director. The appliance was named vShield Manager but the actual product has been renamed to VMware vCloud Networking and Security. So when you search for the software for this product that is what you should search for. To download the software and request an evaluation license key visit VMware's website at www.vmware.com/try-vmware.
VMware offers many appliances for their products. Unfortunately they are not all created equally. The installation and configuration procedures differ for most appliances and also the default usernames and passwords are different throughout the range of appliances. So here is a list of default usernames and passwords. For as far as I know them, if you miss one please let me know and I will add it to this list.
When your hard disk in a VM is too small it is easy to increase the hard disk size. This article guides you through the necessary steps. We start with a VM running Windows 7 that has a 45GB hard disk. See the image below.
The purpose of this article is to explain how to use Microsoft SQL Express to create a database server for the VMware Horizon View Event Database and the Composer database. In a production environment you should use one of the supported databases (MS-SQL or Oracle). But when setting up a proof of concept or a test environment (for example for educational purposes) a SQL Express database will also suffice.
In this article I explain the steps needed to get started with vCenter Operations Manager (vCops). The article is based on deploying the vApp, which is by far the simplest method.
When you need to import a vCenter Linux-based appliance there are two clients that you can use to perform this task. Your best choice is the vSphere Web Client but that will only be available if you already have vCenter running. So that will only be possible for a second or more vCenter server. When you need to import your first vCenter appliance the client you must use is the vSphere Client on Windows. (How to do that is explained here.)
In this article I will explain how to import the vCenter Linux Appliance and customize it with a fixed name and IP-address.
Update Manager is available for all VMware vSphere customers that also run vCenter. It is a separate install on a Windows server that allows administrators to patch and upgrade ESXi-hosts but also to update virtual machines to the latest version of the VMware Tools and new virtual hardware. In this article I focus on these last two features.
Note: As a prerequisite for this article you need to have vCenter Server and Update Manager already installed.
With a default configuration of ESXi no virtual machines will be started when you start your host. In a cluster this also is not most likely necessary because you would migrate virtual machines to another host before you shutdown your ESXi-host. And of course in that case there are no virtual machines to start. But when you do not have a cluster and/or virtual machines are located on your server's local hard disk then it might be useful to start some virtual machines automatically when your server starts.
This article addresses two questions. The first one is: How can I force a time synchronization poll? And the second one is: How can I verify if the NTP-daemon is actually synchronizing with an NTP-server?
I have not found a command to force synchronization (if you know of one please let me know). But a way to do this is to restart the NTP-daemon, once it is loaded it will start with an initial poll and then remains running. To restart the daemon from the ESXi command line run this command:
The vSphere Web Client contains useful filtering options. One of them is to create a filter based on the virtual machine compatibility. This makes it easy to find virtual machines that need an upgrade to the latest virtual hardware version. Just enable the filter (see image below) and select all compatibility modes except the latest one (in this example vmx-10). You will only see virtual machine levels in the filter based on the virtual machines in your environment.
You can shrink a disk from inside a virtual machine running Windows with a command line utility named VMwareToolboxCmd.exe. The disk must not be a pre-allocated disk but should grow dynamically.
Shrinking a disk can also be done from the Control Panel VMware tools entry, but when that is not available you can also do this from the command line. The utility is located in the folder C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools.