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New Windows 8.1 Preview on vSphere 5.1 Update 1

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Apparently Microsoft has just released a new tech preview of Windows 8 ... oh, wait. Sorry, I meant 8.1 (I guess all the cool kids now have a dot one in their release names ;)) I am not exactly sure what is new in this release, but I have been hearing rumors about some start menu thing?

For those of you who are interested in trying out the new Windows 8.1 Preview, you can easily run it on the latest version of vSphere which is 5.1 Update 1 which officially supports Windows 8. To create the VM, you just need to select the latest virtual hardware version which is 9 and Windows 8 (64 or 32 bit) as the guestOS type.

Here is a screenshot of Windows 8.1 Preview running in my home lab environment:

In addition to the OS, I have also successfully installed VMware Tools, VMXNET3 network driver and an HD Sound Card to the new Windows 8.1 VM and everything seems to be running fine without any issues.

Note: You should also be able to run Windows 8.1 Preview on latest version of VMware Fusion and Workstation, but this is not something I have tested.

Well, now that I am done sharing it is time to delete this VM. I need my home lab resources for more important things 🙂

Required vSphere Privilege for Read-Only RESXTOP View

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Yesterday I received a question about the specific vSphere privilege that is required to view RESXTOP data on an ESXi host. The reason for this request was to create a restricted role for a group of users who only needed to have access to RESXTOP performance data. I did not know the answer off the top of my head, but it was a pretty easy to narrow down the specific privilege with a quick test in my lab.

Through the process of elimination, it turns out you just need the Global.Service managers privilege to view only RESXTOP data. It may not seem intuitive, but the Service Manager is responsible for providing vSphere API access to both RESXTOP as well as vScsiStats interfaces which I have written about here.

In my lab, I created a new role called resxtop and then associated the role with the user(s) within the vSphere inventory. You can centrally manage this using vCenter Server or you can do this directly on an ESXi host, but you will need to ensure the role is create on each and every single ESXi host along with it's user association.

Quick Tip - Listing Image Profiles From an ESXi Patch Using ESXCLI

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I was cleaning out a few of my to-do items (list just keeps getting longer everyday) this morning and there was a question that I received a few weeks back asking how to retrieve the list of Image Profiles for a given ESXi patch. This is actually quite easy and you will want to use ESXCLI.

Note: The examples shown below is using ESXCLI on the ESXi Shell, but these commands can be execute remotely as well using ESXCLI or through PowerCLI with Get-EsxCli cmdlet.

To list the available Image Profiles for an ESXi patch, run the following command (ensure you substitute the full path to your ESXi patch):

esxcli software sources profile list -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ESXi510-201212001.zip

To get more details on a particular Image Profile, run the following command and specify the -p for the specific Image Profile:

esxcli software sources profile get -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ESXi510-201212001.zip -p ESXi-5.1.0-20121204001-no-tools

To install/update a specific Image Profile, run the following command with the Image Profile name:

esxcli software profile update -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ESXi510-201212001.zip -p ESXi-5.1.0-20121204001-no-tools

If you just want to install the ESXi patch, run the following command which will install the esx-base Image Profile by default which will include everything:

esxcli software vib update -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ESXi510-201212001.zip

To check for the Image Profile you have installed on your ESXi host, run the following command:

esxcli software profile get

Here are some additional resources for ESXi patch management that may also be useful: