Several ESXi 6.7u3 Questions

[bearhntr]

I hope I am in the right place for these, as most are general and some are annoyances.  

I am building myself a home lab - since I am now 100% WFH, and need a test bed of OSes.  I am very familiar with the ESXI arena, as I maintain the lab at the office which is using ESXI 6.5 on one host and 6.7U2 on the other.

Here are my questions:

1) If my VM Host is talking to my ROUTER (which is my NTP) for my entire home network - everything else is using this server/host (pfSense) to synch time - and VMWare ESXI 6.7 is installed (because in VMWare's infinite wisdom - my LSI 9260-8i RAID controller is not supported in ESXi 7.x)

I have setup the VM Host to point to the IP Address of my pfSense router (NTP is enabled there) --- but I am getting these messages in my brand new installation of MS Server 2019 (which is to be a new Domain Controller -- TIME Accuracy is needed):

The time provider 'vmwTimeProvider' failed to start due to the following error: The device is unreachable. (0x80070141)

VMWare Tools is the first thing that I installed on the server when I built it.

2) Why does the VMTools icon not appear in the system tray? This makes no sense at all - I can see that it is installed, but when I RDP into the first of many VMs to come - there is no VMTools Icon by my clock.

3) Is it possible (and how) to utilize the spare HDD in this server (it has a 6-drive RAID 5 where my VMs are going to be) and a 120GB SSD where the ESXi is installed and boots from. There is another 500GB HDD installed which I would like to use as a datastore accessible by multiple VMs (sort of like a repository of files - like a network share). Can this be done?

[aakalan]

there is a prerequisite for vmware tools. check if you have c++ Redistributable package installed. remove the tools and install again.

The Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable package is a prerequisite for installing VMware Tools for Windows 12.0.0 and ships with the VMware Tools 12.0.0 download package. While preparing a Windows guest for installation, VMware Tools runs the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable Package installer which checks for the presence of a more recent version on the guest. If the guest has a more recent version already present, the package does not install.

[Quickdraw]

If you're not setting the guest to a NTP server independently, you can sync the guest time to the host. 

[mbufkin]

@Quickdraw's method is what we use. The host is using our global NTP server.

[BigMike23]

You should be able to use any HDD's that are attached to the server. As long as they can be seen by the software, they must be setup in the Hardware to be seen.

[bearhntr]

I appreciate the reply - but I tried installing VMT 12.0.0 to my New Server 2019 server - it installed with no errors - in fact afterwards the "unknown sound device" and "network adapter (VMXNET3)" were no longer unknown.  When the VM rebooted and looking at it in ESXI Web Console - the VMT was not recognized.  Only works if the 11.5.3 or below is installed.  

This was not my problem....my problem is that the VMWARE TOOLS icon does not show in the system tray (by the clock).  

[bearhntr]

Thanks for the reply - but not helpful.  

  The point of allowing the ESXI Host to set the time on the VMs servers is that it knows what time it is, and passes that to the VMs.  

  I have used the setting in the past on other VM servers - to set the time on the VMs from the Host - and the Host then synchs to the NTP server on my network - and I do not get errors both in the ESXI console and the VM itself that the NTP synch failed. 

[bearhntr]

Agreed --  It has always worked for me to set this - and enable Guests to synch with the host:

192.168.10.254   is my pfSense Router and is a stand-alone box (not a VM on this system) - and it has the role of NTP on my network. 

[bearhntr]

I would hope so - but what I want to do is to use the 500GB DataStore between multiple VMs - and be able to access it from multiple - like a 'shared storage' location - how do I do this?