To do this, connect to the Virtual Center using the vSphere Client.

Before making any changes, place the server into Maintenance Mode.

• In the Hosts and Clusters section, click the Update Manager tab
• Right-click on an ESX host server and select Scan for Updates
• After the scan, right-click the server again, and select Remediate…
• Check the box for the desired baseline, and click Next to run through the wizard

Note that the server may reboot several times and appear unresponsive during the update process.

VirtualBox has the capability to add VMware .VMDK files into its Disk Manager. However, when launching a new VM from these, a few extra steps may be needed. Read more »

To start a VM in Unity mode (seamless window), use the following command:

vmplayer -U "D:\pathtovm\vmname.vmx"

Note: The “U” has to be uppercase

I recently had a hard drive die in my laptop. Actually, 3 of them died. I know, fool me once, shame on me…

The problem may not have been with the hard drives, but possibly with the laptop. I read online about issues with some laptops overheating, etc. So I had to buy a new laptop, and it made me start thinking about how I could make this one more resilient to crashes and other problems with the operating system. At work, I do a lot of virtualization with VMware ESX, so my thought was to create a virtual machine (VM) on my laptop that I would regularly backup. In the event that it crashed (not if, but when), I would be able to restore the backup image of the VM and I would only lose the data since my last backup. Also, running the guest O/S’es as VM’s would also let me run other O/S versions, such as Linux. Read more »

To change the IP address on a VMware ESX server via the console, issue the following command:

esxcfg-vswif -i 172.xx.xx.xx -n 255.xxx.xxx.xxx -b 172.xxx.xxx.xxx vswif0

Read more »