Migrating to vSphere 4

Very handy information, if you are planing to migrate from VI3 to vSphere 4. You can check out the step-by-step vSphere migration videos. For more details on the migration from VI 3 to vSphere 4. click on vSphere Update Center

Vmware Resolution Path

I found these are very handy when I'm trying to troubleshoot VM, vCenter, or any ESX issues. All you just need to do is to identify the path for the issue and read the vmware KBs to resolve the issue.

Many common tech support issues in VMware products can be solved using Resolution Paths. Resolution Paths are collections of modular steps that can be used to solve tech support issues.Resolution Paths Published

How to enable Web Access on vSphere ESX 4

During our migration to vSpher 4, I noticed that for some reason the Web Access on the new hosts were not working. and I'm not sure why the Web Access to ESX 4 is disabled by default.


To enable this, all you need to do is, you need to ssh to the service console and log in as root.

[root@testone]# chkconfig --level 345 vmware-webAccess on

Once the above command is initiated. then you need to verify if it has been enabled for run level 3, 4, and 5 by executing the below command:

[root@testone]# chkconfig --list vmware-webAccess

vmware-webAccess 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

finally, you need to start the service:

[root@testone]# service vmware-webAccess start

Starting VMware Virtual Infrastructure Web Access:

VMware Virtual Infrastructure Web Access [ OK ]

For more details, refer to: vSphere Web Access Administrator's Guide

ESX Server is Disconnected or Not Responding in VirtualCenter

This morning when I try to log in to my vCenter Server using vSphere Client to verify my virtual farm. The vSphere Client show one of the ESX host had been disconnected from the virtual center by itself. The ESX host itself should be running in critical mode as production and had HA and DRS enable on the cluster.


The first thing I did is to verify that the entire VM’s and ESX host itself is still in production without any issues. Which was the case, all the VM were up and running as normal while the status is disconnected.

After that I had to resolve the issue by reconfigure my ESX host and rejoin it back to the HA and DRS cluster in my production farm.

These are the steps I had to go through to resolve the issus:

1) Disable the HA and DRS features from the cluster

2) SSH to the host in question and then path your way to the /etc/init.d and look for the services "mgmt-vmware status" command.

Then you need to issue the command "services mgmt-vmware restart". This process usually takes a minute or so to get the service fully restarted.

Once the services restarted, you can easily add host to the virtual center and reconfigure the HA and DRS cluster mode again. The ESX host is back to normal and status of all the VM's running on that host should change back to normal and should work perfectly as usual.

In some instances by just restarting the mgmt-vmware might not resolve the issues, and you might need to restart the vmware-vpxa services as well. To restart the vmware-vpxa, all you nedd to do is to initiate the "services vmware-vpxa restart" at the CLI.

For more details, refer to VMware KB