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.
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 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.
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)