VMware Workstation 7.1.2 is available

VMware Workstation 7.1.2 is available.

It’s a maintenance release with some new features and various fixes.

Among them the most intersting ones are:

• Many issues with running Windows 7 SP1 Beta, RHEL 6.0 Beta, and Fedora 13 have been addressed
• NAT networking includes several performance improvements
• VMware Workstation 7.1.2 has been tested with the new free standalone VMware vCenter Converter 4.3
• Easy Install now supports older versions of CentOS.

For a full list of new features and fixes you can refer to the release notes:

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws71/doc/releasenotes_ws712.html

The VMworld Europe Program Guide is out

For everybody that is coming to VMworld Europe 2010, the guide is out.

It can be found here:

http://www.vmworld.com/docs/DOC-5287

Hope to see all of you there!

Fixing the installer of HP Management Agents for VMware ESX 4.x 8.51

Just a weird thing that happened today.

I was upgrading some hp agents on an HP DL380 G6 ESX 4.1 nodes. I just followed the usual steps: put node in maintenance mode, untar the HP tarball and fire the installxxx.sh scripts…but…it stop suddenly with a lot of warning and saying that a “put a strange name here” vm is running and so it’s not able to put the node in maintenance mode (?!).  Obviously something is wrong: not only the node was in maintenance, but the culprit vm just did not exists!

After some test I found that this bug come from the way that the installer uses to check for vm and their state.

It uses the getallvm to retrieve the list, but when parsing the list to retrieve the vm_id get confused by the notes and uses some word from them as vm id and name.

So, to get a long story short, here it is the quick fix.

Just find this line:

vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms > $HPIM_VMLIST

and change it to

vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms | egrep “^[0-9]+” > $HPIM_VMLIST

and the installer will work.

Hope this help somebody else :)

Tunneling vSphere Client over ssh

It can happen that you have to connect to an esx/esxi host through an ssh tunnel (eg you are waiting for the correct opening on the firewall from the network guys or a proxy is blocking the required ports).

If you just set up  tunnels (for example with putty) to ports 443, 902 and 903 the vSphere Client will not fully work.

To have the vSphere Client work correctly just add an entry to your windows hosts file (typically located in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts) that map your esx host to 127.0.0.1:

127.0.0.1  esxhost.domain.com esxhost

After having added the entry, just connect using the alias.

VMworld Europe 2010: italian vGeeks where are you?

E’ un po’ che noto che la community italiana di “vGeek” (permettetemi il termine) sia alquanto latitante e che non esista di fatto un VMUG italiano.

Segnalo quindi con molto piacere l’iniziativa di Fabio Rapposelli (@fabiorapposelli) di incontrarci al VMWorld Europe che si terra’ a Copenhagen tra l’11 e il 14 ottobre.

Fabio ha preparato un form in cui aggiungerci, così da incontrarsi per quattro chiacchiere e magari riuscire a gettare le basi per un VMUG italiano!

Per saperne di più leggete il post di Fabio qui:

http://p2v.it/2010/09/03/getting-ready-for-vmworld-europe-2010/

e iscrivetevi qui:

http://bit.ly/VMworld2010IT

Io ci sarò!