Categories
Virtualization Vmware

VMware Home Lab 1.0

GREAT DAY IN THE MORNING!!!!!

Alright I had to find a different way to start this post, so I decided to borrow Pierre Roberts Catch phrase. I don’t think it worked so he can have it back. 
I wanted to take the time to talk about my home lab that I am currently using. As I mentioned in a previous post I have a Razer Blade 2018 which I will be using to run my lab for now. 
Stock the laptop comes with:
  • 8th Gen Intel Core i7 – 8750H Processor 6 Cores/12 threads up to 4.1 GHz
  • 1 TB M.2 SSD
  • 16 GB of RAM. 
I have been wanting to upgrade it to 32 GB of RAM since I purchased it, however $400 for 32 GB of RAM was just too much for me to swallow at the time. 
I had been watching the price of RAM (particularly for this laptop) for the last few months and saw that it was steadily declining. I finally decided to pull the trigger when it was down to 49% off on Amazon. 
The RAM Arrived a few days ago, and I installed it in the laptop, and I have to say it is awesome. I have never seen a laptop run this good. 
I installed VMWare Workstation Professional 15 (Thank you VMUG Advantage) and I will have a install guide out for that soon. 
I am also beginning to Spec out my VMware Home Lab 2.0 which will also be a Nested Solution. I will probably leverage my Kit.com account to show my parts list once I get it running. 
I hope you find this post helpful and stay tuned for updates.
Categories
Virtualization Vmware

How to add a VM to inventory

So like I mentioned in a previous post, I have been trying to help people out on VMNT or VMware Community forums. One of the posts that I helped out on involved someone who needed  help adding a VM to inventory after it was restored.

Here is how you can add a VM into inventory if it has been removed for some reason

From vCenter, you will need to click on a ESXi hosts
Then click on the Configure tab

Then click on Datastores and select the Datastore that the VM is stored on. 
Right Click the Datastore and select Browse Files

Locate the VM folder, and select the .VMX file

Right Click on the .VMX file ans select Register VM

This will open the Register Virtual Machine wizard. You will need to set the name (which should be pre-populated and select the Data center and click Next.

Select the Cluster and click Next

Select the Application Pool and Click Next

Click Finish to exit the Wizard

 
After you exit the Wizard you will see the Virtual Machine added to Inventory. 
As always I hope that this is helpful for someone. 

RVTools – A VMware Admin’s best friend

Today I would like to talk about one of my favorite tools that I use both internally and with my clients.

RVTools – https://www.robware.net/rvtools/

RVTools is a free utility that you can use to discover what is going on with your VMware Environment. All you have to do it install the client on your machine and in a few minutes you are able to log into your vSphere Environment (using your normal vSphere Credentials) and it will give you a read out of your entire environment.

From the login Screen the look and feel is very reminiscent of the old C# vSphere Client used back in 5.x and 6.0 days.

Once you log in you are presented with the vInfo tab which is a summary of everything going on with the vSphere/ESXi host you Connected to.

Along the top you will see a series to tabs that will drill down into the various components of your environment such as the ones seen below

I am only going to cover a few of these features, but I encourage you to try it out for your self.

 vCD will show you what Virtual Machine has a CD Drive installed on it, if it is connected, and what .ISO is currently connected to it. So ,.for instance, if you have a Virtual Machine that will not vMotion, you could use this tool to see if it is attached to a .ISO that is on Local Storage.

vSnapshot will show you all the Virtual Machines that have snapshots associated with it. It will report back to you the name of the Virtual Machine, the name of the Snapshot, the Date/Time it was taken, and the File Name of the snapshot.

And Lastly we will touch on the vHealth tab. This tab will give you advice on things that you may not realize is going on in your environment such as inconsistent naming, Host logs not being stored on persistent storage, VMware tools being out of date, and Zombies (Files that exist on Datastores, but are not in inventory).

On a final note that I forgot to mention, If you go up into the file menu you are able to export everything you see in the tool to a .CSV which can become very handy for documenting your environment. 
I hope you find this post useful and if you do download this product, please consider donating to it’s creator. Without tools like this it would make all of our jobs much harder. 

How to Change VM from BIOS to UEFI

I just had a question on the VMWare Community about how to change a VM from BIOS to UEFI.

I found that if you go into Edit Settings > Click on the VM Options Tab and you should see this

I hope this is helpful for anyone who needs this information in the future.