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VirtualCenter 1.0 - Trip down memory lane

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With my recent trip down memory lane and getting  to install ESX 1.0 for the very first time, I figured it would not be complete without also exploring the very first release of VMware VirtualCenter 1.0 released back in 2003!


As mentioned in the previous article, I started working with both ESX 2.5 and VirtualCenter 2.0, so I have not had the chance to experience versions prior at least until recently. For those that can recall, VirtualCenter and subsequent vCenter Server releases until vSphere 5.0, was still a Windows application and that meant I needed to find a version of Windows that would be compatible and ideally have all required library dependencies.

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Generating a vSphere UI link to a specific Virtual Machine

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For some organizations, after a VM has been provisioned, it is customary to send a notification (email, slack, etc) to their end users with login credentials including the URL for the vSphere UI.

Typically, the provided URL is just the vCenter Server base URL and end users would then have to login and navigate to their specific VM(s) within the vSphere Inventory. A question was brought up on whether a better end user experience could be provided to their internal users? They were interested in providing their end users with a specific URL link that would take them directly to their VM, which they can also bookmark for future uses.

Furthermore, the customer was also interested in generating the URL programmatically, so that it can be incorporated into their existing provisioning workflows.

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ESX Server 1.0 - Trip down memory lane

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I recently had a bit of VMware Nostalgia and for the past several weeks, I have been working on a personal skunk works project in trying to locate all major ESX and ESXi releases over the past 22 years including ESX Server 1.0 which was released by VMware back in 2001!

To my surprise, finding a digital copy of ESX pre-2.0 (1.0 & 1.5) was much harder than I had expected. Back in those early days, software was not commonly distributed over the internet like it is today, instead it was sent to vendors to create physical CD/DVD discs, which was then shipped to customers and partners. I had also reached out to many tenured folks at VMware who were still around from the early days, but each response lead to another set of folks and it typically either went in a circle or to a dead end. This was turning into an archeological hunt.

I decided to give it one more shot and I pinged John Arrasjid aka VCDX #1 and after a bit of searching, John actually found a pristine copy of ESX Server 1.0, still sealed in the box! Given how difficult it was to locate a 1.0 copy of ESX, we thought it was worth opening up and to preserve this VMware history by creating a digital ISO image, so that I could then share the experience of installing ESX 1.0 with the broader VMware community.

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