Virtual Machine Configuration

How to change the storage adapter to Paravirtual (PVSCSI) for a Windows guest

VMware offers multiple types of virtual SCSI-adapters to use in your virtual machines. Based on your choice of operating system VMware will offer a Buslogic or LSI logic adapter. There is however a Paravirtual SCSI-controller that can improve performance for your virtual machines, especially in environments with high IO-loads. This controller will provide greater throughput and lower CPU utilization for your VMkernel.

How to change the network adapter to VMXNET3 for a Windows guest

VMware offers several types of virtual network adapters that you can add to your virtual machines. Depending on the operating system you install it will select a default adapter when you create a VM. For Windows the default adapter type is the Intel E1000. There is however an adapter that will give you a better performance, which is the VMware VMXNET3 adapter. More information about choosing the right adapter, supported operating systems and the performance benefits of this adapter can be found in these locations:

Updating virtual machine tools and hardware with Update Manager

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.

Configure virtual machine startup-shutdown when starting-stopping ESXi

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.