2009 May 26 - Tue
VMWare Datastore Browser
I'm sure the VMWare people have hidden this on purpose... just so you think you are forced into
installing command line utilities or buying licensing for their management products.
Anyway, I have a couple of ESXi 3.5 U4 servers installed. I created a Virtual Machine on one server, then
used the SSH scp command to copy the Virtual Machine from one host to the other. That is all well and good, but
how do you get it to show in inventory?
The answer to that is to run the VMWare Infrastructure Client. That is no problem. The trick is to click on
the Summary tab while in Inventory mode, and right click on the datastore. One can then browse the datastore.
And one can right click on a .vmx file to register the Virtual Machine in Inventory. That same menu allows one
to upload and download images from a local computer.
I think it would have been more intuitively obvious to have the datastore(s) listed in the left hand tree,
but I guess that would make too much sense.
Some random notes on ESXi 3.5 U4:
- One needs to purchase at least the foundation license in order to get the remote command line tools to
work
- When in the ESXi console, one can use vmkfstools to create and resize virtual drives. The GUI does not
allow the 'thin' command, but the vmkfstools command does. 'thin' is the ability to indicate what the overall
size is, but not to preallocate all the space necessary all at once.
- When using an Asterisk based server in VMWare, allocate at least 500MHz to the server in order to maintain
non slipping time. More
VMWare Timekeeping Best Practices
- Veeam FastSCP: Veeam FastSCP-
VMware ESX/ESXi managment tool
FastSCP provides a fast, secure and easy way to manage files and bulk copy VMs across your VMware ESX
environment.
|
