fusion – Page 9

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!

Want to test drive Apple OSX 10.10 Yosemite? Try it on VMware Fusion & vSphere

06.06.2014 by William Lam // 26 Comments

Earlier this week, Apple announced their next version of Mac OSX at their annual developer's conference called OSX 10.10 Yosemite. For those of you who are part of Apple's Development Program and would like to test drive the latest Developer Preview, you can quickly and safely do so by running it inside a Virtual Machine using either VMware Fusion or VMware vSphere.

Disclaimer: It is important to note that Mac OSX 10.10 is not officially supported by VMware because Apple has not officially GA'ed, however it will run fine for the most part.

UPDATE (07/26/14) - I was able to install the latest OSX Yosemite public beta using the same instructions listed below.

It is highly recommended that you perform an upgrade using the .app from an existing installation of Mac OSX to Yosemite for optimal performance. There are currently some known issues with a fresh installation which may cause some problems, this is currently being investigated by VMware Engineering.

Installing OSX Yosemite on Fusion:

For Fusion users, I recommend using the latest VMware Fusion 2014 Tech Preview and selecting OSX 10.9 as the guestOS. If you have any feedback on the Tech Preview of Fusion, be sure to leave a comment on the Fusion Community Forums. Here are a couple of screenshots going through the upgrade as well as a successful boot of Mac OSX 10.10.

Installing OSX Yosemite on vSphere:

For vSphere users, you will need to be running vSphere 5.5 and using Virtual Hardware 10 which provides support for Mac OSX 10.9 as a guestOS. If you need to perform a fresh installation of OSX, you can follow the detailed instructions here which requires a quick format of the underlying virtual disk before starting the installation. Below is a screenshot of Mac OSX 10.10 running on vSphere on top of my Apple Mac Mini.

Here are a couple of things I noticed about the current Beta of OSX 10.10:

Installing VMware Tools does not work and just seems to hang. If you need VMware Tools, make sure you install it before upgrading
After upgrading from OSX 10.9 to 10.10 running on VMware Fusion 6.0, it seems to hang after reboot
It feels a bit sluggish, potentially from being the first Beta drop

Even with some of these issues, I still think it is pretty cool that you can run a Beta version of OSX that was literally released a couple of days ago. I know VMware Engineering is already hard at work on figuring out the issues and optimizing OSX 10.10 to run just as smooth as past releases of Mac OSX. I am confident by the time Mac OSX Yosemite GA's, that it will be running flawlessly! I also would like to thank Regis Duchesne for sharing some tips on getting OSX 10.10 up and running.

How to finally inject OVF properties into VCSA when deploying directly onto ESXi?

05.27.2014 by William Lam // 40 Comments

One of my biggest pet peeve when it comes to deploying the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) and other OVF/OVA directly onto an ESXi host is the lack of OVF property support. If you have deployed the VCSA before, you are probably aware of the different user experience when deploying to a vCenter Server versus deploying directly to an ESXi host. For those of you who are not familiar, the difference is when you deploy an OVF/OVA that contains custom OVF properties such as the VCSA, you have the ability to provide input to these parameters when deploying to a vCenter Server as seen in the screenshot below.

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