1. Launch Virtual Center or Virtual Client
2. Right click on the orphaned virtual machine
3. Select ‘Remove from Inventory’
4. Now select the host that you would like the VM to reside on
5. Then click on the Configuration Tab
6. Under the Hardware Pane located on the left, click on Storage
7. You should see on the right all the Datastores
8. Now double click on the Datastore where the Virtual Machine VMX file resides, this will launch the ‘Datastore Browser’
9. Now locate the VMX file.
10. Right click on the file and choose ‘Add to Inventory’
11. Go through the wizard and your Virtual Machine should appear online again.

1. Download WinSCP if you don’t already have the application installed.
2. Launch WinSCP and input the hostname/IP Address and username and password
3. This will launch an explorer window.  Create a directory named updates under the var directory
4. Then move the extracted files to \var\updates directory
5. On the host login into the service console.
6. Navigate to \var\updates\(directory name of update) – case sensitive
7. To navigate you can use the cd \var\updates\(directory name of update) command.
8. once you’re in the correct directory where the updates are copied run esxupdates update
9. Your updates should now be installed.

The main reason why I have chosen to use NFS is because you don’t get a single disk I/O so your performance is strictly dependent upon the size of the pipe and the disk array.  It is hard believe but NFS out performs both FC and iSCSI.

Creating an NFS on a NetApp StoreVault was very simple.  First you need to make sure you have the NFS license installed.

Launch StoreVault Manager

Right click on exports and click on manage exports

You will see two shares one is your NAS share and the other is your NFS share

Right click on exports go to add exports and click on browse exports

In your export share you can create a folder, I have named my vmware to state that it will be used by VMWare ESX Server.

Under vmware I have created another folder called vmds to state that it will be a VM datastore. You may want to create other folders such as an ISO folder to store your ISO images.

VMWare gives you the option of installing an OS via CD or an ISO image file. If you are trying to install Windows via the CD-ROM and the virtual machine does not detect the CD then you will need to do the following.

Power off the machine, right click on the machine and click on edit settings. Under CD/DVD Drive 1 Select Device Type as Host Device and select /dev/hda.

Make sure you click on Connect at power on and restart the machine.

It should boot from CD now.

If it is not enabled you will get the following error when you power on the virtual machine.

The cpu of the host is incompatible with the cpu feature requirement of the virtual machine; problem detected at cpu id level 0×80000001 regsiter edx.

VMWare has taken the market with its server virtualisation software and now it plans to do the same with its desktop virtualisation technology.

This video shows how you can deply 100 desktops in 13 mins and only use 10GB of diskspace using Vmware VDI.  The network storage device is NetApps with the use of Data De-Duplication.

Data de-duplication is a storage technology which eliminates duplicate and therefore redundant data within a storage array. In this example, instead of having a 100 copies of the same operating system files, de-duplication would create a symbolic link to each block that contains the files.

1. Download ESX Server 3i Installable ISO
2. Extract INSTALL.TGZ from the root directory of the ISO image using an IZArc
3. Extract /usr/lib/vmware/installer/VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-67921.i386.dd.bz2 from INSTALL.TGZ using IZArc
4. Extract VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-67921.i386.dd from VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-67921.i386.dd.bz2 using IZArc
5. Attach the USB flash drive and make sure you no longer need the data on it
6. Use WinImage to transfer VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-67921.i386.dd to the USB flash drive
   1. Disk->Restore Virtual Hard Disk image on physical drive
   2. Select the USB flash drive (Warning: If you select the wrong disk you will lose data!)
   3. Select the image file VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-67921.i386.dd
   4. Confirm the warning message
   5. Wait for the transfer to complete
7. Unplug the USB flash drive (Warning: If you forget to unplug the flash drive from the PC you might lose the data on your hard drives the next time you boot!)
8. Attach the USB flash drive to the machine you want to boot (Warning: If ESX Server 3i recognizes local drives, you might lose the data on it, so make sure you don´t need it anymore or unplug all hard drives!)
9. Turn the machine on and make sure the USB flash drive is selected as boot device
10. Watch ESX Server 3i boot
11. Configure

Here is a recommended partitioning scheme for ESX newbies.

NEW PARTITIONING SCHEME

Remember this is only a recommendation and the partitioning scheme will be different depending on specific needs.