In the vSphere Client and vSphere Web Client you can find how many days your host has been running. But what happened before that period? How often did your host boot in the past? This information is stored in the file /var/log/vmksummary.log on your ESXi-host. The file is updated  hourly with information how long your host has been up and how many virtual machines are running at that moment.

There are several ways to test if HA is working. You can unplug the power of your server or perform a reset of the machine and a fail over will take place. In training classes and for demo's it's nicer if you can actually have the server to crash and show a Purple Screen of Death (PSOD).

This is the command to execute:

vsish -e set /reliability/crashMe/Panic 1

The normal procedure to convert a template to a virtual machine is to right-click the template in the vSphere Web Client and select the menu-option Convert to Virtual Machine. You would do this for example if you need to update the template with new software, patches or other modifications before using it to deploy additional virtual machines. When the virtual machine is updated you then convert it back to a template.

Importing Virual Machines (also called deploying OVF templates) or exporting them into the OVF format can be done with the vSphere Client, vSphere Web Client or from the vCloud Director management portal. But did you know you can also perform these actions from the command line? There is a utility available from VMware that runs on Linux and Windows that allows you to perform these actions from the command line, and thus can also be used in scripts.