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You are here: Home / How cool is that!? Using VMware Workstation to manage your ESXi hosts (including Free ESXi) & VMs

How cool is that!? Using VMware Workstation to manage your ESXi hosts (including Free ESXi) & VMs

11.21.2013 by William Lam // 9 Comments

To be completely honest, I have not played with VMware Workstation in quite awhile as my day-to-day job primarily revolves around our Enterprise suite of products. In a recent meeting that I was in, I picked up on some interesting tidbits about the latest version of VMware Workstation 10 and after giving it a try in my lab, I thought I would share one very cool feature that you may be aware of (there is actually a lot of cool features in latest release, check what's new here).

The very first thing I noticed is that unlike other downloads from VMware in which you need to register the product and get an evaluation key. VMware Workstation can be downloaded without any registration and you can start the 30-day free trial immediately after installation! I think that is a really slick and can also come in handy if you need to install Workstation right away for something. Make sure you download from this page here by clicking on "Try for Free" instead of going to www.vmware.com/downloads

One of the capabilities that Workstation introduced probably a couple of releases ago was the ability to connect to a remote system whether that is another Workstation instance, vCenter Server and even an ESXi host. At the time I assumed this was to enable users to easily cold migrate a Virtual Machine that was created locally onto one of these remote targets.

What I did not realize was that you could do a lot more with this capability than to just copy offline Virtual Machines. To my surprise I found that you could fully manage the Virtual Machines on these remote targets including changing the virtual hardware configurations such as adding memory, cpu, disk, etc. guestOS as well as provision new Virtual Machines. The VM Console is fully functional leveraging VMRC and you can even connect to Free ESXi instances and get same capabilities you had with the legacy vSphere C# Client.  The other neat thing about this is you can also manage your Virtual Hardware 10 VMs even though the latest vSphere C# Client does not allow this because VMware Workstation 10 is vHW10 aware.

Here is a screenshot of managing my Free ESXi host which is running on my Apple Mac Mini as well as my vCenter Server. As you can see you can have multiple connections open up which is quite useful, especially if you have a couple of Free ESXi hosts in which you would like a single pane of glass to manage.

Another nice feature is the amount of backwards capability it provides for vSphere. You can go as far back as vSphere 4.1 (vCenter Server & ESXi). To prove this in my environment, I provisioned a Nested ESXi running on vSphere 4.1, 5.0, 5.1 and 5.5 and connected them all to Workstation. This is another great way to manage standalone ESXi hosts if you still need to run older versions.

Lastly, you do not need to be running the Windows version of VMware Workstation to get these benefits. You can also do the same using Workstation for Linux and here is a screenshot of running Workstation on an Ubuntu desktop.

As you can see this is just one of many new and cool capabilities of VMware Workstation 10 and I have to say for $250, this is a steal to be able to easily manage not only your VMs running locally but also remote systems like vCenter Server, ESXi hosts including Free ESXi which is a huge deal IMHO. The Workstation team really knocked it out of the park and I am glad I had the opportunity to check out their latest release. I also hope VMware Fusion will be getting these capabilities in the near future! Simon, I hope you see this 😉

More from my site

  • Does VSAN work with Free ESXi?
  • A killer custom Apple Mac Mini setup running VSAN
  • ESXi 5.5 Kickstart script for setting up VSAN
  • Does reinstalling ESXi with an existing VSAN Datastore wipe your data?
  • Quick Tip - Steps to shutdown/startup VSAN Cluster w/vCenter running on VSAN Datastore

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // ESXi 5.5, free esxi, vSphere 5.5, workstation

Comments

  1. *protectedJames Shewmaker says

    11/21/2013 at 4:25 pm

    Workstation 8 was the first one to provide server connectivity, though you could only upload, not download the ESXi hosted VM with Workstation. Workstation 9 was the first version that had that functionality fully enabled.

    Reply
  2. *protectedLouis Bernardo says

    11/22/2013 at 9:08 am

    Works well with Workstation 9.

    Reply
  3. *protectedPaul Hoffman says

    11/23/2013 at 8:51 pm

    This is lovely, and I had overlooked it. But why oh why is this not supported in Fusion Professional for the Mac? We shouldn't have to run OSs like Windows in order to control our ESXi boxes.

    Reply
  4. *protectedVirtually Now says

    12/02/2013 at 4:24 pm

    For whatever reason I can only see my datacenter name and the 'discovered VMs' folder -- no hosts, no VM info. The VMs per se are on 5.0 U2 hosts...

    Reply
  5. *protectedBen Norris says

    02/07/2014 at 1:29 pm

    Can't see any performance graphs or configure the host at all which really limits the usefulness of this and certainly is no match for the vsphere c# client (why doesn't it include what is available in that?). When you access VMs by ssh or rdp primarily, console use is rare and how often do you change cpu/memory other than during creation (which you can't do solely through this because there is no access to storage settings). This doesn't currently seem to be adding much value over a text editor and vmplayer.

    Reply
  6. *protectedckirmizitas says

    09/02/2015 at 7:43 pm

    VMware announced the latest version of its desktop hypervisor product VMware Workstation Pro 12
    http://www.sysadminshowto.com/vmware-workstation-12-pro-new-features/

    Reply
  7. *protectedckirmizitas says

    09/09/2015 at 10:19 pm

    VMware workstation 12 Pro is now available. here is an informative article about new features that come with the latest VMware workstation 12 pro
    VMware Workstation 12 Pro New Features

    http://www.sysadminshowto.com/vmware-workstation-12-pro-new-features/

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Want a free VMware Workstation 10 License? | virtuallyGhetto says:
    03/14/2014 at 2:51 pm

    […] with them on Twitter at @vmw_workstation. One pretty neat feature of Workstation is the ability to manage your ESXi hosts including Free ESXi which really could come in […]

    Reply
  2. Moving Mac OS X VMware Fusion VMs to ESXi (via: Ask Different) « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff says:
    03/23/2014 at 6:04 pm

    […] I really wish VMware Fusion could do what you can do with VMware Workstation to manage your ESXi hosts (including Free ESXi) & VMs. […]

    Reply

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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