StevenWhiting.com

ESXi is up, attempt to login to vcenter and the web client appears to login but has a message displayed at top that it can’t connect to vcenter. Even using vsphere it just won’t login to vcenter.

Access the VMware vCenter Server Appliance from the web client and you get in fine.

Once in, in Summary you’ll see

vCenter
Server:  STOPPED

Start it and it starts fine but still can’t login.

FIX

Go to Setup Wizard and Launch to re-setup the vcenter seems to fix it. Just use default config.
Before you start that you’ll want to stop the Server and Inventory Service. Also stop Log Browser and vsphere Auto Deploy. It could be just Server and Inventory Service that needs to be stopped. Anyway. If you don’t, the wizard eventually fails (as I found out) with the error:

Failed to execute ‘/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg ‘service’ ‘start”:VC_CFG_RESULT=101(Error: vCenter Server failed to start.)

Cloned a VM.  The clone is off and trying to copy the clone disk to another VM on another datastore.

Complains the disk is locked, despite the VM being off and the name being different to the original VM.

So for example original VM hdd is “Mine.vmdk”

New clone is “clone-mine.vmdk”

Seems even though these have two different names, if the original VM is still running and live, it locks the clone disk as well.  Odd.

Turned off the original, now able to copy the clones VMDK.

cd “Server 2008”

Also be aware it’s also case sensitive.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1029513

http://youtu.be/cUcob2Jdatc

Also remembering ESXi being based on Linux or is Linux means directories typed at the console are case sensitive and folders with spaces need ” ” round them.

http://goingvirtual.wordpress.com/2009/07/11/locking-down-vmware-tools/

You need to download the VMX file for the VM, edit it, and stick that at the end.

If you paste this from here beaware you’ll need to retype the ” that are surrounding the FALSE, because in the copy process it messes them up for some reason.

isolation.tools.guestInitiatedUpgrade.disable = “FALSE”

http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2012/05/31/update-vmware-tools-via-windows-system-tray/

Taking a VM from VMWare Workstation 7 use the vmware Converter (Downloaded from their site for free). For me, I wanted my VMs to have an expanding disk, this is how all my Workstation VMs are setup. So their limit might be 100GB, but I know I prop won’t use that and don’t want to waste the space. I want them to expand up to the 100GB when needed.

When you convert the VMs to import them into ESXi though, by default it imports the VMs with the drives set to Flat. So if you set provision to 100GB, it will make the drive 100GB on the ESXi. I found out after I’d converted, annoying. So pick Thin as seen in screenshot below and it will create an expanding disk as well. Flat gives better performance but this is just a test lab so doesn’t matter about that.

http://www.techhead.co.uk/installing-vmware-esxi-4-0-on-a-usb-memory-stick-the-official-way

http://www.techhead.co.uk/why-run-vmware-esxi-from-a-memory-stick-or-sd-card

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1672599#1672599