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{ Category Archives } virtualization

vmware and others

Bash script for automated updates of xenServer

Without a license, xenCenter will tell you what updates are needed and point you to the webpages to download them. If you download them all manually to a folder, you can use the below script to deploy them. It works on linux only (not osx). Some of the updates may fail if you don’t put […]

convert a .vhd to vsphere virtual machine

Every quarter the Federal Desktop Core Configuration folks release new GPOs and VHD files which you can use to build machines which they deem ‘secure’. You can use these machines to test FDCC products (like Qualysguard). The machine they provide should show a ‘passing’ statement for each of the secure configuration items. Once you’ve downloaded […]

Query Disk and Memory Usage on all vSphere hosts

This one leverages the VMWare APIs and queries all your hosts. You’ll need the VMWare Perl APIs installed on the system. It outputs to a web page so you can crontab it to run once a day and then just check the website when you need to see what memory or disk space is available […]

vCenter global search error and fix

I wasn’t able to find this on google so here you go: If you see “Could not acquire an authentication ticket for the query service: https://vcenter.example.com:8443/vms” try restarting the services VMWare VirtualCenter Management Webservices & VMWare vCenter Orchestrator Configuration. This error is received when trying to use the new global search box located in the […]

Create snapshot on multiple VMWare vSphere ESX virtual machines

I wrote a simple script which creates a snapshot on multiple machines. This can also be used to delete snapshots on multiple machines. You’ll need vmware SDK for perl and an answer file with IPs separated by a carriage return like: 192.168.1.100 192.168.1.101 Then use this script: #!/bin/bash API_User=administrator API_Password=INSERT_PASSWORD snapshotName=test answerFile=./answerFile.txt destinationFile=/var/www/default/htdocs/SnapshotsCreated.txt date >> […]

running ESX 4 inside ESX 3.5U4

This isn’t something typically done so it took a while to figure out. Here are my findings. You can install ESX 4 inside ESX 4 but in this case I chose to install it inside of ESX 3.5 Update 4. Regardless, there are a few caveats: 1. If you try to snapshot the image, ESX […]

vSphere Client on windows 7

It is a known issue that the vSphere client doesn’t work on win7 yet. You’ll see the following error message: Error parsing the server “<Server name>” “clients.xml” file. Login will continue, contact your system administrator. The type initializer for ‘VirtualInfrastructure.Utils.HttpWebRequestProxy’ threw an exception. The fix (some of this info was obtained from the vmware forums): […]

going mouseless because of hyper-v

Today I was importing an image into hyper-v, found out some interesting things. You can’t install the integration tools for the client if an old version of integration tools is installed (for example, the image came from MS Virtual Server 2005). The reason were going mouseless is because Hyper-V doesn’t allow any use of the […]

A hyper-V day

Hyper-V is Microsoft’s attempt to reclaim some virtual machine marketshare, after being spanked by VMWare for years now. Virtual PC 2005 was their last attempt and was comparable to VMWare Workstation or Server, but couldn’t hold a flame to VMWare ESX. Hyper-V only runs on 2008 or Vista, it is basically ESX with less features […]