William Lam

VMware Fusion Tech Preview 2 can now connect to ESXi & vCenter Server!

07.04.2014 by William Lam // 4 Comments

There was a lot of buzz this week on the announcement of the first vSphere Beta that is available for anyone to sign up for (still a private Beta with NDA rules), however one announcement that was probably missed is that the folks over on the VMware Fusion team just released their second Tech Preview of VMware Fusion (Build 1943533). Why is this such a big deal? Well, it includes one very exciting new feature that I have been asking for a awhile now, which is the ability to connect to an ESXi host or vCenter Server using VMware Fusion! VMware Workstation has had this feature for awhile now and I have been hoping the Fusion team would eventually implement something similar and It looks like they have finally answered 🙂

You now can connect either a Workstation, ESXi host or vCenter Server using VMware Fusion! If you are like me who primary uses a Mac and you do not want to run a single Windows VM just to be able to use the vSphere C# Client, you can now use VMware Fusion to connect to a vSphere system and perform some basic VM operations, which includes managing Virtual Hardware 10 VMs. You can even use this latest version to connect to the beta version of ESXi host.

Under the File menu, there is now a new option called "Connect to Server" or you can use Command+K for keyboard shortcut.

Here is a screenshot of connecting to a Mac Mini running ESXi 5.5:

Here is screenshot of connecting to one of my remote vCenter Servers:

As you can see this is a super handy feature and you can also have multiple connections to various vCenter Servers, ESXi hosts including Free ESXi! This alone is worth grabbing the latest Tech Preview of VMware Fusion! I can not wait for this feature to be officially released with VMware Fusion, this is going to be a must have feature for any VMware/Apple user!

If you have any feedback on this particular feature or others, please leave a comment on the VMware Fusion Tech Preview community forums!

What happens when Virtual Machines have duplicate instanceUUID's on ESXi?

07.03.2014 by William Lam // 8 Comments

While catching up on some email this morning, I received an interesting question from an internal engineer regarding the behavior when a duplicate instanceUUID is encountered on an ESXi host. An instanceUUID is a unique identifier that is used by vCenter Server to uniquely identify a Virtual Machine within a vCenter Server instance, I have written extensively about this topic here and here. The question that was brought up was what happens when a duplicate instanceUUID is encountered on a standalone/un-managed ESXi host and then it is added to vCenter Server?

I had theory on how this might work, but I figured I might as well try this out in the lab to be sure. I created two standalone ESXi hosts and created a Virtual Machine on each host and made sure that both had the same instanceUUID (yes, the ESXi host will actually generate the instanceUUID property regardless of being connected to a vCenter Server, I suspect this is mainly for a placeholder). I then add ESXi #1 to a vCenter Server and confirmed that the instanceUUID is still the same using the vSphere MOB. I then continue to add ESXi #2 to the vCenter Server and because a duplicate instanceUUID has been detected, vCenter Server automatically updates the second Virtual Machine with a new instanceUUID.

Before adding to vCenter Server:

ESXi-1
- VM1 - InstanceUUID: 52b5e420-9d79-6095-cfdf-dfdd998d205e
ESXI-2
- VM2 - InstanceUUID: 52b5e420-9d79-6095-cfdf-dfdd998d205e

After adding to vCenter Server:

ESXi-1
- VM1 - InstanceUUID: 52b5e420-9d79-6095-cfdf-dfdd998d205e
ESXI-2
- VM2 - InstanceUUID: 502db26b-c32d-6c32-cd6c-1ffc1549d269

An interesting observation that was made by the engineer while testing a similar scenario was that instead of having two ESXi hosts, he just had one. He was a bit surprised to see that the ESXi host actually allowed both Virtual Machines to be powered on even with a duplicate instanceUUID. The reason I believe this was allowed is that both Virtual Machines still had a unique MoRef Identifier along with unique BIOS UUID and more importantly, the instanceUUID property is ONLY used with vCenter Server. From the ESXi host point of view, it does not care if it has a duplicate instanceUUID as it is not used but will try to generate a unique one to begin. This was actually pretty interesting to know and the reason for the initial question was to ensure that the instanceUUID of a Virtual Machine is still the right property to uniquely identify a Virtual Machine within vCenter Server, which it is.

Quick Tip - Handy ovftool 4.0 advanced options

07.01.2014 by William Lam // 3 Comments

I recently had a need to deploy an OVA using ovftool on a Windows desktop and I ran into the following error:

Error: Could not lookup host: root

Since the environment I was deploying to did not have DNS, the failed hostname lookup was expected. This was pretty annoying with previous releases of ovftool but it looks like with the latest 4.0 version, there is a new advanced option called --X:disableHostnameResolve that would allow you to disable this check. Using the new version of ovftool and the advanced option, I was able to bypass the check and deploy the OVA.

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