Last week I told you about the features of the ESX Deployment appliance today I’m going to show you how to setup the appliance in oder to start installing your VMware vSphere servers automatically.

Basically the steps I’m going to describe are:

• Configure ip settings of the appliance
• Configure DHCP
• Mount the OS image
• Import PXE files

After you have finished the download of the appliance from the download site of the EDA and imported it to an existing VMware ESX Server or VMware Workstation we must first power up the appliance.

Then we must scroll down and enter in Reconfigure

Having hard times to deploy several VMware vSphere ESX Servers? after intallation customizations takes days for each new host?. Think I can help you a little bit here.

Last week have been working with ESX Deployment Appliance which is a virtual appliance that provides an easy to use application to deploy VMware vSphere ESX/ESXi servers through PXE.

This small appliance will allow us to:

• Install VMware ESX/ESXi 3.x/4.x hosts
• Define virtual network settings
• Define license server parameters
• Enable VMotion
• Configure NTP
• Add a banner
• Add local users
• Get remote files
• Define hosts file
• Enable SSH root Access
• Plus much more

Basically we need to poweron the virtual appliance, set the correct ip settings and mount an ISO file of VMware ESX/ESXi on its virtual cdrom. Then create a new profile for the ESX host with all the parameters.

Finding information like model, speed, driver version and link status of the network interface adapter model in VMware vSphere using the vSphere Client is really simple.

The first thing you have to do is connect to your vSphere Server with your client. Once connected select the server on the Inventory, click on the configuration tab and then Networking.

Click Properties of the virtual switch where the nic is assigned.

Sometimes creating a new snapshot of a virtual machine or performing a convertion process with VMware vCenter Converter you get the error:

      File is larger than the maximum size supported by datastore

This message tells us that we are trying to create a file that is bigger than the maximum size supported by the file system. The maximum size for a file is determined by the block size that we choose during the format of the volume as VMFs in order to create a new datastore.

Sometimes while trying to access the console of a virtual machine using the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client (connected to the ESX host or the virtual center) the following error appears:

Error connecting: cannot connect to host : A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond. Do you want to try again?

The root user is the user that has more privileges granted on an VMware vSphere ESX Server. For a few reasons sometimes we need to change the password of the user and there’s when our problems starts. From where I can change the root password?.

Here we are to help you solve this but first let us tell you that this simple steps are valid also for regular VMware vSphere ESX users.

The first step is to open up your vSphere client and connect to the server VMware vSphere Server.