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

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?

Vmware announced that the Update 5 of VMware vCebter Server 2.5 (formerly VMware Virtual Center) is available for download (English and Localized) since july 10 of 2009. VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 5 basically solves reported problems and includes scalability improvements allowing to run VMware HA (High Availability) on ESX hosts with more than 35 virtual machines.
If you are planning to upgrade your existing vCenter Server take in consideration that the versions supported are the following:

• VirtualCenter 1.4.1

• VirtualCenter 2.0.2