VMWare ESXI Notes
Security Updates
- VMWare sends advisories to a VMware Security Announcements mailing list as well as Bugtraq.
- Your ESXi user have the "Administrator" role assigned in "Permissions" to install updates. Only root has that role by default.
- Our experience is that updates can go bad so you may want to make sure you have convenient physical or remote console access.
Installing Updates
- Use the VMWare Infrastructure Update utility (installed with the Windows GUI client) to update
- In each VM, poweroff (not just halt).
- Open the VMWare Infrastructure Client, right-click the host and "Reboot".
Data Stores
You can upload files by opening the VMWare Infrastructure Client and going to Summary and double-clicking on your data store such as datastore1. A modal brower will show you the filesystem on the server.
NTP
ESXi has a somewhat hidden NTP client: go to Configuration->Time Configuration and click "Properties" in the top right. Click the "Options" button for NTP servers (you may want to first manually set the host time).
Licensing
Although ESXi is free, by default it installs a time-limited evaluation. To "register" open the VMWare Infrastructure Client and go to Configuration->Licensed Features and copy the license key from the VMWare website (you can go to http://vmware.com/products/esxi/ and get another one if needed).
Monitoring
A Python ESXi nagios script is on the VMWare Communities site. I put a modified version that I use at http://staff.washington.edu/joshuadf/esxi/
You can add a user with "Read-Only" permissions for the monitoring software.
