Tag: VMware Tools
Upgrading VMware Tools on each ESXi Host via ESXCLI
Have you ever wanted to upgrade the version of VMware Tools on your hosts but you’re having an issue with Update Manger/Lifecycle Manager? I ran into this problem recently. I was attempting to upgrade my hosts to the latest version of VMware Tools and even though the remediation completed successfully via Lifecycle Manger finished successfully, each host still reported at…
VMware Tools Shrink Option Unavailable?
In my recent post on using svMotion to reclaim disk space, I talked about using SDelete to zero out blocks for free space reclamation. Another way to do this is to use the Shrink option which is part of the VMware Tools. Duncan’s post here gives details on using the VMware Tools Shrink option so I won’t go into much…
Watch Your Guest Maintenance When Using VM Monitoring in HA, or “Why does my VM keep rebooting?!”
I’m taking the vSphere Design Workshop class this week, and during class one of my classmates mentioned a scenario he encountered that I hadn’t heard of. The situation involves using VM Monitoring as part of VMware HA and performing guest maintenance. VM Monitoring is a feature of HA that will automatically restart virtual machines when the VMware Tools heartbeat is…
More vSphere 4.1 Enhancements – Welcome Back PVSCSI Driver!
As I keep digging into documents and KB articles I keep finding more and more things to like about vSphere 4.1. Today’s find has to do with the PVSCSI driver. With the release of vSphere 4.0, VMware added a new paravirtualized SCSI driver into the VMware Tools that provides better virtual disk performance than the standard LSI driver. The PVSCSI…
Issues updating VMware Tools with Update Manager
I recently updated a lab environment to vSphere 4 Update 2 and wanted to upgrade VMware Tools on several VMs at once. I decided to use Update Manager to push out the VMware Tools update, and during the process discovered an issue between Update Manager and newer versions of Windows. I didn’t try any of the following with vSphere 4.1.…