Poor man’s hostprofiles including ESX deployment

By | May 16, 2011

Last year I was asked to reduce the time spend on installing and configuring our ESX hosts.  Because we weren’t using Enterprise Plus licenses, we didn’t have Host Profiles. I came up with a simple two-step process based on the EDA appliance and a custom PowerShell script. Install the host from PXE. Only setting the… Read More »

Changing the virtual videocard settings

By | May 6, 2011

Some time ago I was asked to create a script that could list each VM’s videocard settings. As you could see that was quite simple. I using the Get-View -ViewType to speed up the query – See LucD’s post on http://communities.vmware.com/message/1511671#1511671 for more info. Then I was asked to set all VM’s videocard setting to… Read More »

Downgrading ESX virtual hardware 7 to 4

By | November 19, 2010

When you upgrade your vSphere environment you normally also upgrade the VM’s virtual hardware to version 7, to take advantage of the new features. This is pretty normal procedure for all VMware admins. But in some very very rare cases you might need to move a VM upgraded to hardware version 7, to a host… Read More »

Configure IBM Blades (running ESX) and Cisco switches for failover

By | September 29, 2010

Using IBM Blades and Cisco switches to run your ESX enviroment? If yes, have you tested what happens if you unplug the network cables going into one switch? If you like me have bundled 2 or more cables going from one switch, to one backbone switch and done the same for the other switch, then… Read More »

Guest warning after upgrade to vSphere 4.1

By | September 25, 2010

After we upgraded to vSphere 4.1, the SCSI adaptor of all our WINXP guests changed from LSI Logic Parallel  to BusLogic Parallel. This change should normally not create any warnings or problems it VMware Tools are up to date. But after the upgrade all our WINXP guests got the following warning when powered on in… Read More »

Copy & Paste option is disabled in vSphere Client 4.1 – default

By | September 21, 2010

Yesterday we upgraded one of our vSphere Clusters to 4.1 – it went smoothly 🙂 But today the users reported that they weren’t able to use cut % paste between the guest and their computer using the vSphere Client (Console). After a quick google we found that VMware has tightened the vSphere security by disabling… Read More »