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 recently upgrade to vCenter Server 5.1 and had an issue with our XenDesktop Desktop Controllers. Version 5.1 significantly changes the authentication method with vCenter by breaking out authentication to a separate service called the vCenter Single Sign On service.
When viewing the information in the XD Desktop Studio the host connection to our vCenter server had a red X indicating there was an issue connecting to the host. The XD Host Service was started so that wasn't the problem.
We recently upgraded our vSphere infrastructure to ESXi version 5.0 Update 1a and we were having some issues upgrading the VMware Tools.
We were getting a Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime error related to TPVCGateway.exe. It appears that this was an issue that was resolved by an ESXi 4.1 patch.
The root cause in our case was that we disable the Print Spooler on all of our servers for security. Well this disabling caused an issue with the VMware Tools uninstaller if the Thin Print virtual print driver was installed.
After patching our vCenter Server recently we were no longer able to use the "Search Inventory" box to search our virtual infrastructure. When we tried we would receive the following error:
Login to the query service failed. Unable to connect ...
The full error text has been abbreviated.
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).
Have you been pulling your hair out trying to get a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine deployed from a vCenter template to join a Windows Active Directory domain? Fear not, the solution is at hand and is realtively simple.
After reading the following thread on the VMware Communities site:
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/251925
I found out that one needs to use the FQDN of the AD domain and NOT the NetBIOS name of the domain, and also the user principal name for a user with proper permissions to join computers to the domain.
