VirtualVCP IT Virtualization

Yesterday I had the unpleasant experience of having to go through my email to find an email I wrote back in February 2011 in which I detailed the steps required in order to perform an offline update of VMware ESXi hosts via PowerCLI. Had I posted the steps here on this site at the time, it would have saved me a lot of pain in trying to retrieve the email from an Enterprise Vault archive! So, as I have learned my lesson, I am posting the steps required to update ESXi from PowerCLI.

At the time of writing the instructions, the update that I was looking at was ESXi 4.1 Update 1. However, the steps below will work on all newer ESXi versions as well.

VMware provides offline updates that can be downloaded from their website in the form of .ZIP archives. These updates can be downloaded from:

http://www.vmware.com/patchmgr/download.portal

Prerequisites

In order to perform the update with PowerCLI, you will need to have Windows PowerShell and PowerCLI installed on a workstation. Most VMware administrators will already have this installed.

Windows PowerShell:
If you are using Windows XP, PowerShell can be found on the Microsoft Website. If you are using Windows 7, Windows PowerShell 2.0 is already installed as part of the OS.

VMware PowerCLI:
Once PowerShell has been installed on your workstation, you will have to download and install VMware PowerCLI. You can download PowerCLI from here:

http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vsphere/automationtools/powercli

Steps to apply an offline update, in this case ESxi4.1 Update 1, to ESXi via PowerCLI:

1.   Place the host that is going to be upgraded in Maintenance Mode.

2.   Download ESXi 4.1 Update 1 from here:
 
https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/OFFLINE/release-260-20110127-912579/update-from-esxi4.1-4.1_update01.zip

3.  Using a utility such as WinZip or 7Zip, extract the downloaded file to a new folder on your C:\drive

4.  Using the vSphere client, copy the files that were extracted to a folder called “Patches” on any datastore on the SAN that is visible to the host. This can also be placed on a local disk on the ESXi host, however, by placing the updated on shared storage will allow you to update more hosts from the same set of update files, without having to copy the files to each host.

5.  Open the PowerCLI Console from your Start menu.

6. When the prompt pops up, connect to the vCenter server where the ESXi host is being managed from using the following command (you can also connect directly to the host if you like):

  Connect-VIServer <VCENTER-SERVER NAME OR IP>

7.   After the command has been issued, you might be prompted for a username and password.

8.  Apply the patch with the following command:

9. Install-VMHostPatch –VMhost <ESXi name or IP Address> -HostPath /vmfs/volumes/<datastore-name>/Patches/metadata.zip

Note: I have seen a lot of cases where administrators try to point Install-VMHostPatch directly to the update zip archive downloaded from the VMware website. This will not work. You have to extract the archive, copy all of the data to a location that is accessible to the host to be updated, and point Install-VMhostPatch to the metadata.zip file.

I am happy to report that I have managed to get the VMware View PCoIP Client to work on openSUSE Linux 12 with the GNOME 3 desktop environment. The first client I tried was the VMware View Open Client, which is an open source project. However the View Open Client does not support PCoIP and only connects to the View desktops using RDP. As I am not a fan of RDP, I was keen on getting PCoIP to work.

Some background as to why I needed the PCoIP View Client to work on Linux:

Generally for remote access to my lab, I use the VMware View PCoIP Client for Windows, Android and iOS (on the iPad). VMware has made the PCoIP client available on all of these platforms, but no Linux PCoIP client has been released. This article should get you up and running, but bear in mind that it is not supported by VMware.

When working on a Linux VM via the VMware Remote Console over a WAN or slow link, the keystrokes sent to the console might end up reppeating. In order to avoind this, perform the following steps:

1. Power down the VM

2. Add the following line to the VMX file (can also be done by editing the Advanced VM settings using the vSphere Client):

keyboard.typematicMinDelay = "2000000"

3. Save the VMX file

4. Power on the VM.

I decided to post this as I keep on forgetting what the fix is. Now I'll know where to find it in the future without having to go to Google ;-)

Following the changes made by VMware to the vSphere 5 vRAM allocation sizes, I've released version 0.6 of my vSphere License Calculator to reflect the new vRAM allocations.

Please download version 0.6 and let me know if you discover any further problems with the calculator.

*The vRAM Entitlement for vSphere Enterprise has now been corrected to 64GB*

The new version of tha calculator can be found here