One of my resolutions for 2013 is to write and post articles more frequently. Here's my first attempt.
At my company we are heavy users of VMware/ESX/ESXi. It's what we have used for well over 8 years. One of the reasons why: it just works, it's stable, and (as it related to this post) the virtual networking is just simpler (in my opinion).
Trying to put a host into maintenance mode in vCenter and one machine wouldn't VMotion because it said VMware Tools were being installed or upgraded.
Searching Google came up with this article which applies to ESX 4.x:
http://lonesysadmin.net/2009/12/11/how-to-cancel-a-stuck-vmware-tools-in...
Well vmware-cmd is gone in ESXi 5.x. Here's how you do it in ESXi 5.x:
cd /vmfs/volumes/[datastore]/[vmname]
vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms
Note the VmId of the machine having the issue. Then run:
vim-cmd vmsvc/tools.cancelinstall VmId
We use Citrix Netscalers for web application security and acceleration. In order to test some things before a deployment of some new Netscalers we wanted to test then using Citrix's Netscaler VPX virtual appliance (http://www.citrix.com/netscalerVPX).
UPDATE - May 25, 2010 - It appears that our Dell DSET problem is hardware-related. We seem to have some hardware problems which are causing the DSET utility to reboot our ESX host. If you are having this issue, you should call Dell and let them know (you probably are already in contact with Dell if you're running DSET).
We'll let you know what we find out with regard to our hardware.
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We've been having problems deploying Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machines from templates using the VMware vCenter and it's built in guest customization.
It appears that there may be an issue either with Microsoft's built-in sysprep utility in 2008 R2, or with VMware's vCenter guest customization wizard when using a Key Management Server, or KMS. A KMS is part of Microsoft's Volume Activation 2.0 as described here - http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/existing-customers/product-activation... and in this TechNet article - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb892849.aspx
