Knowledge

• Configure/Modify virtual machines
  • Add/Hot Add virtual machine hardware
    You can add and remove hardware for Virtual Machines via the GUI and the CLI. We will be discussing the GUI only here. Depending of the state of the VM (on or off) you can add certain hardware. When a VM is off all types of hardware can be added / modified / deleted.
    To edit the hardware properties of a VM:
    • Right click a VM is the vSphere Client
    • Click “Edit Settings…”
      
      
    • Click the Add button to add additional hardware
    • Select existing hardware to modify or delete
    • Follow the instructions on screen to execute your selected operation
  • It is possible to add / modify certain aspects / remove some types of hardware while the VM is running. This is called “Hot Add”. This might depend of the type of guest OS you are using. You can Hot Add the following types of hardware:
    • USB Controller (new device type in wizard)
    • Ethernet Adaptor (Hot Add / Remove new in ESX 4.x)
    • Hard Drive
    • SCSI Controller
  • Grow virtual machine disks
    You can grow a virtual disk both when a server is turned on and off. To grow a virtual disk:
    • Right click a VM is the vSphere Client
    • Click “Edit Settings…”
    • Select the disk you would like to grow and click increase the size of the disk on the right side of the screen
    • Click OK to apply and close the screen.
    • The “Recent Tasks” screen show a progress indicator that the disk is being increased.
  • Determine appropriate disk format
    The are some options to choose when creating a Virtual Disk. I think that the difference between thin and thick provisioned disk is meant here. You can choose this during the creation of a Disk and during a VMotion of a VM. Also you can browse to the .vmdk file using the GUI and choose to inflate the disk.
    • A Thin provisioned disk is a disk that is assigned a predefined amount of disk space, but the disk space is not being used on the VMFS volume until the VM actually needs the space. Because many VMs will never fully use the assigned disk space this can potentially save much space. The downside is that you can over-commit you VMFS volumes with the danger of quickly filling the volumes when many VM start to allocate space at the same time (virus, large updates, etc.).
    • A Thick Provisioned file system is a file-system that works a little bit more the old fashioned way. When you assign a VM a 20 GB partition a 20 GB file is created on the VMFS file system whether the VM uses it or not. This is a little bit more save, but way more inefficient use of disk space.
• Connect virtual machines to devices
  I Presume PCI devices are meant here. vSphere allows you to connect a physical device directly to a VM. This allows a VM to directly access this device for optimal performance and compatibility. The PCI Device has to be on the HCL. You can assign a PCI Device to either the VMkernel or as a pass through device, but not both. So dual of quad port card has to be either one.
  Read more here and here about restrictions and how to configure.
• Configure virtual machine options
  • General Options
    To open the general options of a VM:
    • Right click a VM in the vSphere client
    • Select “Edit Settings…”
    • Select the tab “Options” in the new window
    • In the left pane “General Options” is selected by default
      
      
    • Edit the VM Name of Guest OS type here
  • Advanced Options
    • Right click a VM in the vSphere client
    • Select “Edit Settings…”
    • Select the tab “Options” in the new window
    • In the left pane select “Advanced”
      
      
    • There are several field you can change. As stated on the Advanced window you can leave those to the default most of the time. Consider this a warning from VMware ;-). I won’t go through all the option but you can enable mem and CPU hot plug and NPIV (SAN WWN to a VM) here.
  • Power Management Options
    Can oly be changed when the VM is off
    • Right click a VM in the vSphere client
    • Select “Edit Settings…”
    • Select the tab “Options” in the new window
    • In the left pane select “Power Management”
      
      
    • Change the way how a VM responds to the standby mode here, and allow “Wake on LAN” (WOL) Support here.
  • VMware Tools Options
    When the VMware tools are installed in the guest OS this allows for a more controller Guest OS. You can control the VM with the play, pause and stop buttons. Those buttons, unlike in VMware ESX 3.5, perform a soft pause of shutdown (guest shutdown) of the OS by default. You can change these settings here. To go to the panel:
    • Right click a VM in the vSphere client
    • Select “Edit Settings…”
    • Select the tab “Options” in the new window
    • In the left pane select “VMware Tools”
      
      
• Configure appropriate virtual machine resource settings
  You can change the reservation, shares and limit of VM resources on a per VM level. Also the way the VM handles hyper threading can be configured. To do so:
  • Right click a VM in the vSphere client
  • Select “Edit Settings…”
  • Select the tab “Resources”
    
    

Tools

• vSphere Basic System Administration Guide
• Product Documentation
• vSphere Client