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).