A. Mikkelsen VMware ESX scripts, commands, tools and other nice to know things that will make your virtualization days easier!!!!

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Problems uninstalling VMware Tools

Filed under: Errors,Troubleshooting,Virtual Center,vSphere (ESX) — Tags: , , , , , , , — A. Mikkelsen @ 2:09 am

To night I had problems with uninstalling VMware Tools in a VM after updating to the latest ESX release.

The uninstaller kept asking me to insert the “VMWare Tools” disk and click OK”.
In the popup window there is pull-down field labeled “Use Source” and in this field is the number one (“1”).

If I tried to browse to the the “VMware Tools.msi” it returns an error: “The file ‘X:\VMware Tools.msi’ is not a valid installation package for the product VMware Tools…”

The solution I used to get around this problem was simply:

  1. Open the registry
  2. Locate “[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Installer\Products\8E24D35BB278E034284D0860A513CF1E” and delete it.
    (If you don’t want to delete it, just rename it or make a backup first)
  3. Run the VMware Tools installation again.

And wola it nor works 🙂

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Sudden error – kernel Panic…..

Filed under: Troubleshooting,vSphere (ESX),White Papers — Tags: , , , , , , — A. Mikkelsen @ 22:36 pm

Right after lunch today I had a host (3.5 U3) crach with a kernel panic.

It shouldn’t be a problem for clusters running HA, but on this cluster I had disabled HA bacause of an error and hadn’t had the time to depug :-(.
So my VM’s couldn’t be started on a new host and I’m not going to manually register 116 VM’s on another host – so I was forced to find a soultion.

I did a bit of googleing and found VMware KB10196.
I followed the steps and everything is now working – AND HA IS ENABLED 🙂

This is the steps i followed:

  1. Reboot the host into “VMware ESX servere (Debug mode)”
  2. Log in with a user with root permissions and run the following commands.
    esxcfg-boot -p (reloads the PCI data)
    esxcfg-boot -b (sets up boot information)
    esxcfg-boot -r (refreshes initrd)
  3. Now just reboot the host.

After the reboot the host should work as normal. From the VC Client you can verify that the host is connected to VC.

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