If for any reason you need to determine whether a specific instance of VMWare View Connection Server is installed as a standalone server or a replica server, you can do so by looking into the registry.
In HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM, the value ServerInstanceType will indicate which type the CS is:
1 = standalone/first CS
2 = replica CS
Note that this doesn't really matter, as the only difference between them is whether they set up a new ADAM instance or connect to an existing one. After the installation of VCS, they are identical.
Hyper-V does not allow to be installed on a machine that's already virtual (such as on another Hyper-V or VMWare). For VMWare, you can circumvent this by adding custom configuration parameters to the VM's configuration.
Add these to the VM's configuration, either through the vSphere (web)client, or by directly editing the VMX-file:
hvh.enable = TRUE hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = FALSE
If you're editing the VMX-file, you need to enclose the values (behind the =) in double quotes (").
I wrote a script to list virtual disk information for a specified VM, including VMDK path, SCSI IDs and more. It is loosely based on this script but excludes all WMI info.
It is possible to install the integration plugins for VMware on an ESX host directly from the Nimble website, provided your hosts have internet access:
esxcli software vib install -d http://update.nimblestorage.com/esx5/ncm
With PowerCLI, you can generate all sorts of lists. To retrieve the configured and reported OS version of your VMs, try running this one-liner:
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Get-VM | Sort |
Get-View -Property @("Name", "Config.GuestFullName", "Guest.GuestFullName", "Guest.IpAddress") |
Select -Property Name,
@{N="Configured OS";E={$_.Config.GuestFullName}},
@{N="Running OS";E={$_.Guest.GuestFullName}},
@{N="IP Address";E={@($_.Guest.IpAddress)}} |
Export-CSV -Delimiter ";" -Path "vms.csv"Found this interesting read on VMFS Extents and some of the (negative) myths that have arisen over the years:
https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/02/vmfs-extents-are-they-bad-or-simply-misunderstood.html
You can quickly get a list of VMs, the datastores they are using and the logical folder they are in through PowerCLI:
Get-VM | Select Name,@{N="Datastore";E={[string]::Join(',',(Get-Datastore -Id $_.DatastoreIdList | Select -ExpandProperty Name))}},@{N="Folder";E={$_.Folder.Name}}
Combine it with Export-CSV to export the results to a CSV file.
You can download installation files and ISOs of any of the latest versions of VMWare Tools for each released version of ESX:
→ https://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/index.html
This is useful if you need support for a certain OS version but are not able to upgrade the ESX host in order to get it (e.g. Windows 10 support on ESX 5.5 "non-u3").
Note that, although officially unsupported, VMWare Tools is technically backwards compatible, meaning you can install a newer version on a guest running on an older ESX host.
