vSphere 5.1 – Page 2

w00t! VMware Tools for Nested ESXi!

11.11.2013 by William Lam // 42 Comments

I have been working with Nested ESXi since it original inception and this technology has greatly benefited me and the entire VMware community, especially when it comes to learning about VMware software and being able to easily prototype something before installing it on actual hardware. However, one thing that I felt that has been missing for awhile now is the ability to run an instance of VMware Tools within a Nested ESXi VM. I have personally been asking for this feature for a couple of years and I know many in the VMware community have expressed interests as well.

I am super excited to announce that VMware has just released a new Fling that provides you with a VIB that you can install VMware Tools inside a Nested ESXi host. I originally showed a demo of this at VMworld Barcelona in my vBrownBag Tech Talk and as I mentioned we would be releasing this as a VMware Fling very soon. So here it is!

UPDATE (08/20/15) - An updated version of VMware Tools for Nested ESXi was just published, make sure to download latest version and you can find more details here.

Requirements:

Nested ESXi running 5.0, 5.1 or 5.5

Installation:

To install the VIB, you simply just need to download it and upload the VIB it to your Nested ESXi datastore and then run the following commands:

esxcli system maintenanceMode set -e true
esxcli software vib install -v /vmfs/volumes/[VMFS-VOLUME-NAME]/esx-tools-for-esxi-9.7.0-0.0.00000.i386.vib -f
esxcli system shutdown reboot -r "Installed VMware Tools"

You can also install the VIB directly from VMware.com if you have direct or proxy internet connectivity from your ESXi host by running the following commands:

esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient
esxcli software vib install -v http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/esxi_tools_for_guests/esx-tools-for-esxi-9.7.0-0.0.00000.i386.vib -f

Once the VIB has been successfully installed, you will need to reboot the host for the changes to take effect. To verify, you can now login to either your vSphere Web/C# Client and you should now see the status for VMware Tools for your Nested ESXi host showing green and the IP Address of the Nested ESXi host should be displayed.

So why would you want to do this? Well, there’s a couple of reasons actually. The first one is pretty basic, which is when I need to reboot or shutdown a Nested ESXi VM, instead of having to jump into the VM console or SSH into ESXi host, I could just right click in the vSphere Web/C# Client and just say shutdown or reboot. I also tend to do all sorts of craziness in my lab (I’m sure this is an understatement for folks that know me) and may often break networking connectivity to my Nested ESXi VM. In vSphere 5.0, we introduced the Guest Operations API (formally known as VIX API) which is now part of the vSphere API. This API is actually quite handy as it allows you to perform guest operations within the VM without needing network connectivity as it relies on the fact that VMware Tools is running (pretty cool stuff!).

Here is a screenshot demonstrating the executing of vmkfstools through the Guest Operations API to one of my Nested ESXi VM:

A couple of things to note:

If you install VMware Tools on Nested ESXi VM, you will NOT be able to just right click in the UI and say install/upgrade
If you wish to integrate this into you ESXi image, you can take a look at a community tool called ESXi-Customizer created by Andreas Peetz which I have used in the past and works great. Image Builder does not support raw VIBs, only zip files which may need to contain additional metadata information. If you want to create an offline bundle instead to then use Image Builder to create your custom ISO, Andreas has a new tool you can take a look at here.

Finally, if you have any feedback (likes/dis-likes), thanks, comments please head over to the VMware's Fling page for VMware Tools for Nested ESXi and leave a comment. I am sure the Jim Mattson the engineer who built this Fling would greatly appreciate any feedback you may have.

How to clear the ARP cache in ESXi prior to vSphere 5.5

09.19.2013 by William Lam // 3 Comments

Yesterday, I wrote an article about a new ESXCLI command that will be available as part of the soon to be released vSphere 5.5 release which allows a user to clear the ARP cache on an ESXi 5.5 host. It was my understanding that with past releases of ESXi, that it is not possible to clear the ARP cache. While working on that article, I came across an internal thread and learned that it was possible to clear ARP entries prior to ESXi 5.5, however the method is not as ideal as using the new ESXCLI command.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk

In ESXi 5.1, you can list the current ARP entries for an ESXi host by running the following ESXCLI command:

esxcli network ip neighbor list

To clear a particular ARP entry, you will need to use the unsupported vsish interface. To delete a specific ARP entry, you will need to run the following command:

vsish -e set /net/tcpip/v4/neighbor del [IP-ADDRESS]

Here is a screenshot of listing the current ARP entries using ESXCLI and then deleting one of entries using vsish:

As mentioned in my previous article, I am glad we have made this into an official command in ESXCLI 5.5, but if you are in a crunch you can still clear an ARP entry if you are not running ESXi 5.5 using vsish.

Handy Keyboard Shortcuts for the vSphere Web Client

07.30.2013 by William Lam // 7 Comments

After publishing an article about the vSphere Web Client Recent History Feature, I received question from a reader asking about the keyboard shortcuts that were available as part of the legacy vSphere C# Client. The reader really enjoyed these shortcuts as a way to quickly navigate between the various inventories and was wondering if similar keyboard shortcuts existed for the new vSphere Web Client? I was not able to find anything in our documentation and decided to reach out to our UE (User Experience) folks to see if they could assist.

Though we do not have every single keyboard shortcut that was available from the legacy vSphere C# Client, we actually do have quite a few and this somehow must have gotten missed during documentation (I have filed documentation bug on this). In talking to our UE folks, some of the challenges in adding the keyboard shortcuts was to find shortcuts that have not already been taken by either a web browser (vSphere Web Client is a browser application) or the Operating System used to connect to the vSphere Web Client. It was also very important if new shortcuts were added, that it would be easy to understand. As you can see this was not a trivial task at all.

The screenshot below provides a quick overview of the available keyboard shortcuts for the vSphere Web Client. Take a look at the table below for a more detailed break down of each keyboard shortcut.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard Combination	Action
Ctrl+Alt+s	Quick Search
Ctrl+Alt+Home OR Ctrl+Alt+1	Home Screen
Ctrl+Alt+2	Virtual Infrastructure Inventory
Ctrl+Alt+3	Hosts and Clusters Inventory
Ctrl+Alt+4	VMs and Templates Inventory
Ctrl+Alt+5	Datastores and Datastore Clusters Inventory
Ctrl+Alt+6	Networking Inventory

I was able to verify these shortcuts on both a Mac OS X system as well as a on Windows. This is something I definitely will be bookmark as a useful reference. If there are other keyboard shortcuts that you have grown to rely on in the legacy vSphere C# Client and would like to see in the new vSphere Web Client, feel free to leave a comment and I will make sure it gets to our UE folks.