I had recently discovered a really cool new feature that has been added into the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.5 CLI Installer while helping out a fellow colleague. For those of you who have not worked with the VCSA before, you can deploy it using one of two methods: 1) Guided UI Installer 2) Scripted CLI installer. The latter […]
How to change/deploy VCSA 6.0 with default bash shell vs appliancesh?
When logging into the new VCSA 6.0 via SSH, you will notice that you are no longer dropped into a normal bash shell but into a new appliancesh (pronounced appliance shell) environment. This new interface provides basic set of virtual appliance management capabilities including Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) access which makes the majority of operations […]
How to evaluate the vSphere VCSA Beta running on VMware Fusion & Workstation?
If you are taking part in the vSphere Beta (available to public to sign up but still under NDA), you may have recently noticed a new milestone release (RC) that has been made available for download. Having been a long time Beta participant when I was customer and still continuing to do so in my […]
OVF Runtime Environment
I recently noticed a trend of questions from various users about extracting specific bits of information such as the version of ESXi that’s running or the MoRef ID of the VM, all while within the guestOS. I had already written an article about this topic awhile back called How to extract host information from within […]
How to extract host information from within a VM?
From time to time, I see this question come up asking how one might be able to extract a certain piece of information from either ESX(i) or the management APIs (vSphere API) from within a virtual machine. The simple answer is you can not, by default the guest operating system has no idea of the […]