VMware View Third-Party Certificates (Pre 5.0.1)

I always have to go back and do the searches again to find these when I need them.

For pre-View 5.0.1, doing the cert with keytool... These are the resources you need:

Familiarize yourself with both of them before proceeding. The TcpDump one is particularly good, buit it omits making a 2048-bit request.

TcpDump

VMware KB 1008705

FIX - VMware Windows 7 VM with no Audio [ESXi]

I have a template we make some persistent VMs from and they haven't been getting audio. For some reason it took me a little bit to track this one down.

Device Manager, add Legacy Hardware, Have Disk

C:\Program Files\Common Files\VMware\Drivers\vmwvaudio\vmwvaudio.inf

No reboot needed.

[If you don't have this directory you'll need to copy it from a system with working audio.]

TIP: vMotion VLAN or Else

The impact of not following the 'best practice' of putting my vMotion and Management traffic on a dedicated VLAN seems to have finally showed itself.

I've been on a persistent VM for 3+ years now. It's been great, except for occasionally I'd get 'Session Lost!' on my zero client. It didn't happen often enough to concern me ... until it did. It was around this time that we started noticing several of us were being kicked off simultaneously. Those of us on 100Mb had issues, but not those of us on 1000Mb.

Thanks to having Riverbed Cascade we could see that the smaller ports were being flooded and overwhelmed by broadcasts from a vMotion port. Two days after establishing the VLAN and I have seen zero sessions lost.

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1736018

FIX - Windows update cannot currently check for updates because the service is not running

I've run into this message a couple of times and since I've had to search on it both times, so I'm documenting it here.

Windows update cannot currently check for updates because the service is not running.

The fix, each time, has been to go into Updates, Change Settings, Choose to 'Never check for updates' and OK, then back to wherever you want it and OK again.. You should now be able to search for updates.

Tip - Moving Windows ODBC Connections

On the system with the connections you want, export HKLM\SOFTWARE\ODBC\ODBC.INI
On the receiving system, rename ODBC.INI to ODBC.INI.BAK before adding.

Drivers and Patches via CLI

Host ESX/ESXi Patches via CLI:

I've had to re-look this up a few times and there's a rather good (and similar) write-up here but these are my notes.

...

First things first, you need to be sure of know what you have now.

Patches:

For Build Numbers, if 'vmware -v' doesn't do it, try 'rpm -qa |grep -i vmware-esx-vmx', otherwise check KB 1012514.

Search for the version of vSphere you want to update and download the zip to your HD.

Drivers and Driver Updates:

If you're getting drivers and they're in an ISO you'll need to extract the .zip from the offline-bundle folder.

You'll also want to check what version you're running before install and after final reboot.

In the case of QLogic drivers: cat /proc/scsi/qla*/* |more

Then go and the get drivers you need.


Install:

These examples use the location c:\vmwareupdates

vicfg-hostops.pl -o enter -url https:// <hostname or IP>/sdk/webservice

Enter username: root

Enter password:

Host <hostname> entered into maintenance mode successfully.

vihostupdate.pl -i -bundle c:\vmwareupdates\<name of package.zip> -url https:// <host name or IP>/sdk/webservice

Enter username: root

Enter password:

Please wait patch installation is in progress ...

The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective.

vicfg-hostops.pl -o reboot -url https:// <hostname or IP>/sdk/webservice

Enter username: root

Enter password:

Host <hostname> rebooted successfully.

vicfg-hostops.pl -o exit -url https:// <hostname or IP>/sdk/webservice

Enter username: root

Enter password:

Host <hostname> exited from maintenance mode successfully.

Simple & Easy VMware Thin Client

How about a 38.4MB linux distro with View open client that is simple to set up and works great?

http://repurpose.vmwaredotg.com/tcbuilder/

Go to the build page and put in your criteria and it compiles an ISO for you.

You can burn that to CD, or put it on a thumb drive. [I used UNetbootin in Ubuntu to put it on a thumb drive.]

One gotcha is that, by default, the View client uses the time setting of the client. Since the client, in this case, is the tinycore linux distro that has minimal configuration, you get the timezone of your VM changed to UTC.

You can follow VMware KB 1006773, or edit /boot/isolinux/isolinux.cfg in the ISO or on the thumb drive to add your timezone, i.e.: append initrd=/boot/core.gz quiet cde kmap=de-latin1 cde tz=EST

It gets trickier if want to include DST, but it is doable.

If someone figures out how to get this running on a Raspberry Pi, please let me know.