To connect to VC or not?

[timbo475]

In our normal ESX environment, our ESX 3.5 servers are managed in VirtualCentre.

I've been building an ESXi 3.5 server and added it as a host to our Datacentre. After that you could login into the ESXi server via VIC using root but had very limited permissions e.g. couldn't shutdown guest or create new VMs). Is there anyway to add it to VC Datacentre without losing permissions or do permissions have to be assigned through VC for the local root account? It appears that once I added it to VC, it started using VC as license method by default. I did change the liecnsing method to serial (thinking this may get permissions back) but still the permissions were restricted. I'm starting to think it was the fact that it was using the VC licensing rahter than connecting to VC that was causing the restrictions. If licensing type is changed, is a reboot of ESXi required?

If we do decide to keep it as a stand-alone ESXi server and not add it to VC environment, is there anyway to copy VMs to the ESXi server?

Cheers,

Tim

[bulletprooffool]

You can change licensing without a reboot.

I'd add it to a VC if I could, but if you do not have a VC, you simply need to shut the VMs, remove them from inventory, copy them to the new storage (if they are not on network storage) - then import them on the new host.

alternatively, you could try automate it:

If you need something to copy the VMs, I'd consider trying FastSCP by Veeamm.

the other alternative is to use VMWare convertor . . . but I always favour moving the files personally.