ESX 5.5 - How do you update VM settings of your VCenter VM?

[mcwill]

We were hit last night by a fun problem... if your VCenter VM is at version 10 compatibility; how do you edit its settings?

After the upgrade to 5.5 our VCenter VM was a bit memory constrained, so the VM was shut down and I connected the vSphere client to the host in order to increase the memory, but discovered this isn't permitted on version 10 VMs. After a bit of head scratching I ended up removing the VM from the inventory, editing the vmx file by hand and re-attached the VM to the host...

But surely that's not the recommended method?? I can cope with changing a memory size via editing the vmx, but I wouldn't like to add an interface this way.

Regards,

Iain

[Medium]

Hello Lain

You need to use the web client for that, the native client only support up to version 9.. sadly..

Best Regards

Medium

[a_p_]

Unfortunately, this seems to be something that the developers and product architects forgot to consider. Anyway, one way other than to editing the VM's configuration file manually is to use e.g. PowerCLI to do the job.

Connect-VIServer -Server <Your-ESXi-Host-IP-or-FQDN>

Get-VM "Your-vCenter-Server-VM-Name"| Set-VM -memoryMB 8192

André

[JarryG]

Honestly, I hope this is just workaround and temporary fix...

[mcwill]

I had assumed the web client would allow the change to be configured to occur at the next reboot (in a similar manner to upgrading the VM Hardware version) but this wasn't the case.

After hitting the problem I did check the VMware documentation again and discovered a warning not to upgrade the VM Center app to version 10 but could find no such warning in the installable VCenter sections of the document.

[grasshopper]

> We were hit last night by a fun problem...

Just wanted to say thanks for sharing.  Because any sentence that starts like that is admin talk.  We should all do that more (me included).

[dkvello]

It's a classic catch-22. I had the same issue with the Appliance version. Needed more Memory and CPU, and was hit by the "web" only for changing HW. Very silly not to catch this simple problem in development.

P.S. Also, be careful to activate vFlash cache on the vCenter Server Appliance virtual disks... It wasn't a pretty sight. There too You'll end up in a catch-22 problem (it made the Appliance very unresponsive++) when You try and remove the vFlash cache again. In my case it refused to remove the cache because there was allready an active task pending (the task was vCenter reconfiguring itself to remove vFlash). Here too You then run into the Web-only config problem since vFlash config/un-config cant be done from the Client.

[FoaRyan]

I'm still looking for a solution to this. I need to double the memory in my vCenter server, but that can only be done with it offline. However, I cannot modify VMs without vCenter being *online* in 5.5, and with hardware at version 10 (i.e. on the 5.5 level). There has to be a way to accomplish this without a workaround. 5.5 has been around since 2013 and I refuse to accept command line workarounds for something as essential as managing virtual hardware. Does anyone know a way to get this done through the "normal" channels?

[JPM300]

Yeah or the installer shouldn't allow you to put the vCenter web client on the same VM as vCenter if your going to version 10 or put a giant warning for this.  This is part of the reason as to why we haven't moved our vCenter to hardware version 10.  We won't move it to version 10 on vCenter until the Web client has full administration control over all Vmware Plugins and stand alone hosts as a procaution

[Bleeder]

It wouldn't really matter if the Web Client was on a different VM from vCenter, because the Web Client still depends on vCenter to be running.  You cannot direct-connect the Web Client to an ESXi host.  This is a perfect example of why the Web Client is an unacceptable replacement for the legacy vSphere Client.

[HendersonD]

Moral of the story, leave all of your VMs at hardware version 9 until VMware sorts out this mess

[Bleeder]

Or vote with your wallet.  The greater part of a year has gone by with no sorting of this mess.

[cjscol]

You can edit the settings of a HW version 10 VM running on ESXi 5.5 using VMware Workstation 10.  In VMware Workstation 10 there is an option to connect to a remote server, use this to connect to the ESXi host your powered down vCenter server is on and then edit the settings.

I would also suggest configuring the vCenter VM for Hot Add Memory and CPU so in the future you can increase the memory and/or CPUs without powering it down.

In the past I have done as André suggested and used PowerCLI.

[Bleeder]

That's great but customers who already paid for vCenter shouldn't have to pay again for a Workstation license.