Basic System Administration -Part 3

With ESX 3.0 you can migrate suspended VMs under cold migration process. You can move files of VMs only when they are power off and suspended.

When you modify User’s permissions, Users do not need to log off and log on into Virtual Center for changes to take effect. All changes take effect immediately.

You can define permission on

• VM
• Folders
• Datacenters
• Resource pools
• Templates
• Host
• Clusters

You cannot directy define permission on

1. Networks
2. Datastores

In virtual center you can assign permission to

• Folder
• Datacenter
• Host
• VM
• Templates
• Cluster
• Resource Pools
• In ESX server you can assign permission to
• Resource Pool
• VMs
• Hosts

There are two types of roles

System (cannot be modified): administrator/read-only/No-access

Sample (can be modified):

Detail Description is available in Excel Sheet HERE

Basic System Administration -Part 2

When you install VMWARE Tools it installs

1. Vmware tool service
2. Set of Vmware device drivers

• SVGA Display drivers

• Vmxnet networking drivers

• Bus Logic SCSI drivers

• Memory control driver

• Vmware mouse driver

• I/O consolidate backup to quiesce I/O

1. set of scripts that let’s you automate guest OS
2. component that supports copying between the guest and managed host

If you don’t have vmware tools installed you don’t have option to restart or shutdown option. You will’ve to gracefully shutdown OS within VMs console. In order to upgrade VMWare tools, you need to shutdown VMs.

When you suspend VMs, a file is created with a. vmss extension is created, which contains the entire state of VMs. The remove from inventory cmd removes the VM only from VI client and not from from it’s datastore, however delete from disk removes it from datastore. Similiarly .vmtx is extension for template and remove from inventory and delete from datastores applies here as well. File with NVRAM extensions contains BIOS Settings.

In many cases, you can get past the problem by temporarily disabling acceleration in the virtual machine, but the applications stablize deselect “disable acceleration”

Choose Hyperthreading Sharing Mode from the pull-down menu. The options are:

Any – (default) The virtual CPUs of this virtual machine can freely share cores with other virtual CPUs of this or other virtual machines.

None – The virtual CPUs of this virtual machine have exclusive use of a processor core whenever they are scheduled to it. The other hyperthread of the core is halted while this virtual machine is using the core.

Internal – On a virtual machine with exactly two virtual processors, the two virtual processors are allowed to share one physical core (at the discretion ofthe ESX Server scheduler), but this virtual machine never shares a core with any other virtual machine. If this virtual machine has any other number of processors other than two, this setting is the same as the none setting.

Audio is available only for Windows XP and not for Window2000/windows 2003

If you wish to edit template, you’ll need to convert the template into VM.

Customization of guest OS is saved in xml file. Saved customization files are unique to each VirtualCenter Server and to each version of VirtualCenter due to encryption. You must recreate the customization files for each VirtualCenter Server. Also if you uninstall VirtualCenter and later do a fresh installation, the ability to decrypt passwords from the earlier installation is lost.