I came across an interesting issue today with vCenter 5.0 (ESXi build 5.0.0 515841). For some reason one of my hosts was in a disconnected state, and the following error was being displayed in the vSphere console: A more complete error description is below: Cannot synchronize host HOSTNAME. A general system error occurred: Unexpected exception [...]
Archive of posts filed under the VMware category.
Ubuntu open-vm tools on VMware
Just a quick one today. I have been using Ubuntu Server as a staple for linux virtual machines on VMware as it is stable, and fast. I don’t like using the VMware based vmware tools, as I find it can break things on occasion. Open-VM Tools is a good substitute as it is based on the opensource [...]
Patching ESXi through SSH
Sometimes it might be necessary to patch an ESXi host through SSH for various reasons, some of which might include: You are using the free edition of ESXi and don’t want to download the vSphere CLI package You need to update a remote ESXi host and only have access to SSH through VPN The host [...]
VMware Serial Port Named Pipes
Just a quick one today. VMware Workstation has the ability to attach serial ports to virtual machines and guest operating systems such as Vyatta use the /dev/ttyS0 serial port as a console port, allowing you to simulate administering the system “headless”. One situation you may want to use this in is when you’re trying to [...]
VMware Error: Unable to communicate with the remote host, since it is disconnected.
I ran into an interesting issue today when I had to move my VMware ESXi lab back to the basement. My lab consists of three servers; two ESXi 4.0 nodes and an Openfiler 2.3 iSCSI SAN. To power the beast down, I would normally power down all virtual machines, then power down the ESXi nodes, [...]