VMware customers with a license that includes the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) can work with affinity and anti-affinity rules for virtual machines and hosts to keep virtual machines on preferred hosts. Customers without DRS do not have such a built-in feature. After a server failure or after maintenance virtual machines may be on different hosts and not running on the host where you would want them to run.
PowerCLI is an extension to Microsoft PowerShell which allows VMware administrators to automate tasks in their VMware environment. This article is a very brief guide to getting started with PowerCLI.
1. Download and install a recent version of Powershell
It might already be installed on your machine but if not download and install the most recent version from the Microsoft PowerShell website.
VMware customers with a license that includes the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) can work with affinity and anti-affinity rules for virtual machines and hosts to keep virtual machines on preferred hosts. Customers without DRS do not have such a built-in feature. After a server failure or after maintenance virtual machines may be on different hosts and not running on the host where you would want them to run.
Starting November 11, 2024 both desktop hypervisor products VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion will be available for free to everyone—commercial, educational, and personal users alike. This was announced in this VMware blog article.
VMware Workstation is the desktop hypervisor for Windows and Linux. VMware Fusion is its counterpart for MacOS.
The ESXi command esxcli has many namespaces and options to choose from. It may sometimes be hard to find what the exact command is to perform a task. You can of course use a search engine to find what you need. But with this practical tip you can also find what you need with the esxcli command itself.
First let's have a look at the command itself. When you execute the command without any parameters it will show the possible options and namespaces.
When alarms on vSphere are triggered by the vCenter Server there is an option to run a script. That script will run on the vCenter Server appliance in Linux. In this article I will explain how to setup the script location and permissions and will show a demonstration script.
First of all let's look at the alarm definition in the vSphere Client. In the image below you see an alarm definition for a virtual machine event. When the VM reaches the powered off state this alarm will be triggered. The script that is configured to run is: /home/vpxd/alarm.sh.
When accessing vCenter through the vSphere Client you will find all objects in the inventory by name, such as VM-01, ESXi-01, Datastore-01. These objects also have an internal identifier that is being used by software when logging information about these objects and you might also need those identifiers when using commands. Especially when using NSX many commands that you can execute from the NSX Manager Central CLI require the use of the identifiers.
When a virtual machine is migrated from one ESXi host to another the traffic for that vm has to be delivered to the destination host and no longer to the source host. How is the physical switch informed about the move? ESXi sends out a Reversed Address Resolution packet on the destination host that will trigger the physical switch to update its MAC-address table. In this article I will explain how this process works and why it is important.
The session recordings for VMware Explore 2024 are available for free for everyone to watch.
In May 2024 VMware by Broadcom announced that their personal virtualization software is now available for free for personal use. This is for VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion.
VMware Workstation Pro: Now Available Free for Personal Use
Because these are now available for free the previous free to use software Player for both Windows and MacOS is now no longer available.
One of my students asked if it is possible to also login to the vCenter server appliance management interface (VAMI) with an Active Directory account. The VAMI is available on your vCenter server on port 5480. After installation of the vCenter Appliance you can login with root and with administrator@vsphere.local (or a different SSO-domain name if you have entered something else than vsphere.local).
When using the vSphere Client it is only possible to export a virtual machine as a template in OVF-format. Exporting in OVA-format is not supported at the moment. This functionality has been removed since vSphere 6.5 (documentation).
It is however possible to export a virtual machine in the OVA-format with the VMware OVFtool via the command line.
In February 2024, shortly after the acquisition for VMware by Broadcom, VMware has removed their free hypervisor ESXi from their website.
End Of General Availability of the Free vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi 7.x and 8.x) (2107518)
VMware has published this bog-post that clarifies what will happen with products that where previously available with a separate license. Some products are now available as part as VMware Cloud Foundation, vSphere Foundation or an add-on service. Other products will no longer be available. Here's the link to the blog explaining about all of this:
VMware End Of Availability of Perpetual Licensing and SaaS Services
In October 2023 the VMware Flings website became unavailable. That was a bummer for all VMware enthusiasts that where using the tools and utilities from that platform to make their lives easier and improve their management capabilities for their VMware environment.
Starting with NSX-T version 3.1 it's a feature to have NSX-T create it's own service account when registering a vCenter Server as a Compute Manager. In the image below you can see the option enabled in the vCenter connection.
Normally updating a vCenter server appliance is as simple as accessing the VAMI interface on port :5480 and have the appliance download it's own update form the default update URL. And when that's not possible you can always just download the ISO-file and mount that on your vCenter server appliance.
 VMware's end user computing products are now part of Omnissa. Articles related to VMware Horizon from VMwarebits.com are now published at Omnissabits.com. |
When using Horizon View Instant Clones several objects are created in your vCenter Inventory that are used to assemble the instant clone virtual machines. If you want to find the relationships between those objects then you can read about that in another article on this website here.
VMware's end user computing products are now part of Omnissa. Articles related to VMware Horizon from VMwarebits.com are now published at Omnissabits.com. |
When using Instant Clone virtual desktops in your environment you will find several objects in your inventory that are used to run these machines. The next image shows the folders with the cp-template, cp-replica and cp-parent objects.
In vSAN virtual machines in your inventory have an association with the objects on the vSAN datastore. If you would remove a virtual machine from the inventory but not from disk then the objects on disk will still consume disk space but you will not able to see the direct link with the virtual machine that was previously in your inventory. Such objects on your vSAN datastore are known as unassociated objects.