Blackforce » esx

Restart VMware Service Management Port

Dale — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:50:03 +0000

To restart the service management port on ESX and ESXi carry out the following commands :

ESX

service mgmt-vmware restart

ESXi

/sbin/services.sh restart

VMware Infrastructure, Blank / Black Console Screen

Dale — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:01:39 +0000

Its usual practice to RDP to a Virtualcenter box and then access the Console of Virtual Machines. However today I had a customer where when they went to the console screen of the VMs it just was black. No image was drawn at all.

Restarting the Virtualcenter server and the ESX servers did not resolve the matter.

The solution in the end was to increase the colour depth of the RDP session. With 256 Colours the Console screen is not drawn. Never knew that.

VMware ESX – Commit snapshots safely with no data loss.

Dale — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:52:05 +0000

If you have been unfortunate enough to find yourself with loads of snapshots in ESX and have snapshots with file sizes bigger than a couple of GB. Then you might be scared to commit them in case of data loss.

You can easily get rid of all the snapshots without any data loss. Using the VMKFS tools you can clone out the hard drives in their current state including snapshots to 1 VMDK. To do this run the following when SSH’d in.

vmkfstools -i harddrivename-000001.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/datastore/ new foldername/new_harddrivename.vmdk

Then it will clone the drive. This may take a couple of hours depending on the size of your drive. Then you just attach the new drive to a newly created VM.

VMware Knowledgebase : 1002458

VMware ESX – How to find out what VM’s have snapshots / Deltas

Dale — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:41:47 +0000

Found out a nifty command which allows you to find out what VM’s have Delta / Snapshot files. Run this when SSH’d in.

find /vmfs/volumes/ -name "*delta*" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 du --human-readable --total

Or for ESXi the command below

find /vmfs/volumes/ -name "*delta*" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 du -h

Using VMware – Run trial software indefinitely without registration.

Dale — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 12:56:31 +0000

I’ve been playing round with VMware Workstation recently. I’ve found a neat trick that you can do with it which could allow you to run trial software indefinitely without registering it. I suppose this could also be used for Beta’s of windows etc. This should also work on Vmware ESX, Workstation and Vmware Server. (Vmware Server is Free)

In order to do it you would do the following :

- Install your flavour of windows in your vmware product.
- Install VMware tools
- Disable Windows Time Sync
- Power off the Virtual Machine
- Navigate to the folder where the Virtual Machine is stored.
- Open the .vmx file in notepad
- Add the following lines to the end of the file.

rtc.startTime = "1230800400" tools.syncTime = "FALSE" time.synchronize.continue = "FALSE" time.synchronize.restore = "FALSE" time.synchronize.resume.disk = "FALSE" time.synchronize.shrink = "FALSE" time.synchronize.tools.startup = "FALSE"- Power on the VM
- Install your trial software
- Power off the VM
- Edit the .vmx file
- Change the following lines
from: rtc.startTime = "1230800400" to: rtc.startTime = "1230886800"- Power on your VM
- Start using your machine and software.

Basically the way that this works is that everytime you power on your Virtual machine, the date and time of it gets set to 2nd Jan, so you will always be on day 1 of your trial.

Obviously this might break some softwares t&c’s so be careful. Proof of concept really.