VMWare View Not Ready for Primetime !

Here it is; my first official Rant!

First off, Id love to hear your comments/concerns/fellow rants. So comment away!

Who else thinks VMWare View is not ready for the big leagues yet?
VCenter and VSphere are phenominal, well thought out, highly elaborate products. What happened to View?
Now granted its a much newer product, only several updates in, but come on. Its missing the elaborate, little knit picking qualities that make VC and VS so good.

At my previous employer, we found about a dozen instances where functionality was missing. We call up their support line and the tech says, ” Oh wow, you’re right, that would be very useful in this product. Please submit a feature request!”

These suggestions are not bells and whistles. They are major functionality that this product is missing.
For isntance:
Certain naming conventions are staticly assigned, not dynamic. What does this mean? When you change a datastore name in VS for instance, all goes well and merry on its way in VS. But in View, this causes a catasrophe. If pools and VMs in View are linked to that particular Datastore name that you changed, everything is f-d. Why wouldnt you have View read the datastore by ID instead of name? The ID will never change.

Another example, which is a bit more extreme, yet Ive had to do this –> re-architect your ip addressing for your View environment. What if youre a small company and you build a test environment in View. Users being to use this and suddenly you have 100 users in your environment and they love it. Management wants to release it into production. But they dont want it at your desk anymore (just an example), they want it in the datacenter. Well the datacenter is in a different subnet. So you need to change your VC IP address. Well guess what? View doesnt like that. In its config files, it keeps the new and old VC ip address and names. So lets say you change VCs IP address and all looks well. All your new pools will be wonderful and work like a charm. They were created and working off of the new VC address. But what happens to the old pools (where 100 users are still working). Well, they have lost contact with the cached (old) VC ip address. They cannot recompose,refresh and most of the time cant automatically provision new machines without user intervention.
Boo!

Ill quit while Im ahead and readdress this later on.

Enjoy

~AT~

What is an IP Address?

Well, for lack of a better way to put it, its your computers address on the network.

So lets put it into every day terms:

Your network is like your neighborhood.
There are many houses
Many Streets
Many Signs

And it gets confusing. Well so does your network.

The IP address is your houses street address. Its a way for people in your neighbordhood to find your house.
And so it is on your network. Its a way for other machines to find (and talk) to your machine.

A person who wants to talk to you would drive down your street and look at the house numbers. 1 Somewhere Lane. 2 Somewhere Lane. 3 Somewhere Lane. Aha! 3 Somewhere Lane is where I want to go. So they park in your driveway and come to your house.

This is how information travels as well. It comes across the wire/cable/link with something to tell you. It looks around your network and sees – 192.168.0.1. Then 192.168.0.2. Then 192.168.0.3. Aha! This is the computer we want to talk to.

Hope this helps and Ill continue to put some thoughts in writing.

How Do You Enable Copy/Paste from local-to-vSphere (VMs)

The locked down functionality of vSphere and View sometimes is not right for people.
Sometimes, security is not the biggest concern and users want the ease of access to copy and paste between local-VM environments.

So there is a simple way to do this, and its as follows:
On a machine by machine basis-

Log into vSphere and go to the machine you want to copy/paste to.
Power it down. (To amend settings on a machine, it needs to be powered down)
Right click on the machine and Edit Settings.
Go to the Options Tab
Then Advanced > General
Then Configuration Parameters

You want to scroll through the list and see if you have the following: isolation.tools.copy.disable false
isolation.tools.paste.disable false

If not, select Add Row.
Enter those 2 lines in.
Hit Ok all the way through and power on the virtual machine.
Voila!

Now if you want to do this on every VM that is created there is a different way to do this-
Log into the ESX(i) host as root and navigate to the following path : /etc/vmware/config
Open the file and insert the following lines:isolation.tools.copy.disable=”FALSE”
isolation.tools.paste.disable=”FALSE”

Save and close the file.

Keep in mind that the VMs will need to be restarted for these options to take affect.
Also, if you upgrade the host or reinstall ESX, these options will not carry over.

Enjoy

Who Am I

Hi All,

Im your Anonymous Techy for the evening and I invite you to take a seat, relax and join me as I attempt to explain the tech world , as we know it, to the everyday man (and woman). There are many questions that are commonly asked about IT and technology in general. Im here to try and answer those questions in laymen terms . My goal is for the “Aha!” moment; to hear people say, ” Oh, I get it now!”

So lets move forward and see if we cant get some IT knowledge into those brains of yours !

Sincerely,

~AT~