VMWare Vcenter/ESX 5.5

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Well it’s been a long while since I used Vcenter, and now it’s gone all web based.  Which is a damned shame IMHO.

But the plus is that ESX can now run nested!

The first stumbling block was installing vSphere.  The 2008r2 server that I’ve been given access to is part of a domain, but I’ve only got local access to the server.  The annoying part is trying to logon right after install.  My Windows user ID doesn’t work, and logging in as ‘admin’ or ‘Administrator’ doesn’t work.  Thankfully I found a hint, to install SQL Management Express to mine the VPX_ACCESS table (my SQL Express instance was \VIM_SQLEXP), and discover that the Administrator logon is

VSPHERE.LOCAL\Administrator

Now with that in place I can now logon to my vSphere.

Screen Shot 2014-02-20 at 7.30.14 PM

The next fun is configuring the ESX VM.

Screen Shot 2014-02-20 at 7.28.07 PM

By default it’ll try to DCHP itself.  Which is great if you have DHCP, but in my small test area on the cloud I don’t have DHCP.

One huge pain I find is that you have to manage version 10 VM’s through the web UI, which let’s face it is dreadfully slow.  Also it looks like you still need the ‘fat’ client to manage storage.  Ugh.

I’ll probably update this more the further along I get.

2 thoughts on “VMWare Vcenter/ESX 5.5”

  1. What’s worse about the version 10 thing is that (as far as I can tell) VMware doesn’t provide that web interface without vSphere, and they don’t provide that with the “free” ESXi licence.

    Might be the start of a switch to Xenserver (although it still needs Windows for its management app) and Proxmox as it seems like VMware is starting to tighten the screws on the freeloaders who just run a server or two for fun and couldn’t possibly afford a commercial licence, even if they wanted one.

    • I’m a big fan of proxmox/ve, but at the same time openstack includes KVM so there is also that for larger installations.

      KVM is the kernel accelerated Qemu on Linux, which is nice. I’ve just inherited a project that is deep in VMWare, and that is why I’m loading it nested. Also they are using a VM to provide storage (wtf?) so I’d want a sandbox before even dreaming of messing with production.

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