Tag: vmware

Convert OVFs to an OVA without the ovftool.exe

admin •
VMware requires you to have an account to logon and download a free tool called "VMware OVF Tool".  That alone is not annoying.  What is annoying is that the tool is extremely slow.  There is a much faster way to create an OVA without the need of this tool. Using the ovftool is easy enough, the following is an example...Read More »
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VMware Expand Hard Drive Size and Extend in CentOS 7 Linux

admin •

One approach to adding space to an existing Linux hard drive that is using Linux LVM is to add space to the drive. This can easily be accomplished in VMware. This has been tested using VMware vSphere Client for Windows with CentOS 7.5 (minimal install). To demonstrate a before and after, here are a few commands that can be used...

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VMware Workstation loses bridged network

admin •
VMware Workstation loses bridged network and it does not want to come back following the usual methodologies.  I restarted the VMware Workstation services, used the Network Manager, and reboot the computer all to no avail.  In the end, it was something that wasn't a problem before. Problem On a Microsoft Windows 10 workstation running VMware Workstation 12 for many months...Read More »

VMware Workstation loses bridged network

admin •
VMware Workstation loses bridged network and it does not want to come back following the usual methodologies.  I restarted the VMware Workstation services, used the Network Manager, and reboot the computer all to no avail.  In the end, it was something that wasn't a problem before. On a Windows 10 workstation running VMware Workstation 12 for many months without issue,...Read More »

VMware vSphere Client incorrectly displays Guest OS version for CentOS 7.4

admin •
The vSphere Client (desktop) Version 5.5.0 correctly displayed the CentOS 7.x point releases until version CentOS 7.4. Where it once displayed, Guest OS: CentOS 4/5/6/7 (64-bit) under the Summary tab of the virtual machine, the display is Guest OS: Linux 3.10.0-693.17.1.x86-x64 CentOS Linux release 7.4.1708 (Core). As I once thought that this was problematic, I found a discussion in Gitlab...Read More »

Convert an OVA/OVF VirtualBox to ESXi

admin •
This guide won't go into the actual export of a VirtualBox OVA with the intended use for a VMware ESXi 5.5 environment.  It won't even use the conventional tools that some sites suggest; however, this method worked for me. After repeated failure attempts to import a VirtualBox OVA, I used 7-zip to extract the contents (ignoring any error or warning...Read More »

Add a new hard disk without rebooting in Linux

admin •
Having added a virtual hard drive to a virtual machine, the fdisk -cul command doesn't reveal any new drives.  There are a few ways to get Linux to recognize this new drive without having to reboot the computer. A tried and true method that I have used on many occasions is this approach.  The problem with this approach is that...Read More »

Rebuild the virtual machine’s .vmx file from vmware.log

admin •

While attempting to diagnose a problem where there are a couple of (orphaned) virtual machines as identified by the VMware vSphere Client, one of interest seemed to have all the files in the datastore, however, upon closer inspection the .vmx file was zero byte.  The .vmx file can be rebuilt with the vmware.log file. Basically, I downloaded the most recent...

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