How do I edit the setttings of a version 10 virtual machine in ESXi 5.5 free edition?

[toms57]

When I try to edit it says I need to use the vSphere Web Client, is there a web client for the free version?

[Schenkewitz]

The same question I asked myself. Although I have vsphere and vcenter licenses, but we can not edit the VMs with hardware version 10 via the normal client.

This is of course completely impractical in the case of a vCenter server error.  How can we possibly edit a VM if the vCenter for some reason is a offline and we

only have access to the normal client and the Web client together with the vCenter is offline.

It can not be the purpose behind it that we now have to buy heartbeat. And it's not every run a High Availability.

[intripoon]

I'm also wondering about this. I just updated my free ESXi 5.1 to ESXi 5.5 and upgraded the hardware version to 10 and now I seem to need a vCenter license to configure my vms? How is this considerd to be free?

[Schenkewitz]

There is some additional Problem, too. If you create a virtual machine with VMware Workstation 10 and use VM-Version 10 and put it on an free ESXi, you can't edit the VM anymore without vCenter Server and Web Client.

I hope not vmware expects us to buy some essentials bundle with vcenter server essentials in it in order to solve the problem. then the free ESXi would be obsolete.

[RockT]

I have read, that you can access the free ESXi with VMWare Workstation 10. And then you can edit the rev10 VM on ESXi.

ATM I don't have ESXi5.5 nor VMWare Workstation, but can this be done?

[ScreamingSilenc]

Its not a right way to do but if you really need to edit your VM then open the vmx file from and change the "virtualHW.version = "10"  to lower version say 9.

Now you will be able to edit VM in VI Client without Web Client.

Once edit is done revert back to previous version.

[toms57]

I agree it is not the correct way but if I need to get access it is helpful. This will not let me take advantage of the new features 5.5 has to offer in a version 10 vm so why would Vmware put out a free product I cannot use?

[intripoon]

Besides the already mentioned problems with the "web client vcenter only"-approach this is converging to, there is also the issue that a vcenter vm takes 8GB of memory away. If ESXi demands vcenter in the future, the whole idea of ESXi being more lightweight compared to ESX is kind of dropped.

[Samsonite801]

I just ran into this same issue last night when I upgraded to ESXi 5.5 and now am wondering what is the logic behind any of this. I did later install the vCenter Server Appliance (from ova), and it indeed hogs 8GB of memory (when the ESXi box only has 16GB on it), and then when I went into vSphere Web Client and tried to add my ESXi host to the datacenter I created, it failed and said the ESXi Free Hypervisor license I had installed on that host is not compatible with the vCenter Eval license I was using.

This is blowing me away so far..

RANT:

I've been working for a year now trying to get around the 2 TB limit on my home system, that I am about to just run Windows back on bare metal again since that seems to be the only way I can get my 11 TB array to be seen in Windows.

-PCI passthrough only works for Windows VM to see 2 TB or less (as JBOD), but as 11 TB RAID 6 array not visible.

-ESXi wont allow pRDM as it thinks that Adaptec SAS RAID is local storage (even though my other LSI SAS backplane is seen as not local and allows pRDM but disks bigger than 2 TB not allowed).

-ESXi will allow datastore of 11 TB but even on 5.5 it wont let me create a virtual disk of 11 TB as it complains the boundaries aren't right.

Several months ago, I did successfully set up a virtual NexentaStor SAN with PCI passthrough and did software ZFS raidz2 which hogged a ton of resources and then one time when 2 disks went out of sync and got checksum errors it did a scrub to fix it which took 436 hours to complete in a fully degraded state. That is the point when I decided that a SAN should only run on bare metal and not as a VM on ESXi.

Then I came back to the idea of trying to get PCI passthrough to work in Windows again, or pRDM, vRDM (in 5.5), and so on.. But still nothing works.

ETC, ETC.

Now I'm about ready to just go back to square one and dump hypervisors all together and go back to bare metal on everything at home. I would try Windows but Hyper-V wants to run on Windows Server I guess, which costs more money..

My last ditch effort before I do that is to try an LSI or Perc-5 adapter to see if ESXi will see it as remote storage so pRDM will work?

[stoerkel]

May you can try a ssh to yout ESXi Box and make some use of vmkfstools -z to get your rdms ?

[intripoon]

@Samsonite801 Maybe this is the wrong place to mention this, I can't help you much with your issues there except for one point: Hyper-V got free as well. There is Hyper-V 2012 core which you can download and use for free. It's stripped down windows server with basically only hyper-v and you can enable filesharing I think. There is Hyper-V 2012 R2 core coming next month.

[Samsonite801]

Not to hi-jack this thread, so I will just close by saying in reply to stoerkel that I already did that like from here: Creating RDMs on SATA drives

...using vmkfstools -z from ssh,

...but I am one of the few who continually get the infamous error of:

Failed to create virtual disk: Invalid argument (1441801).

Nothing I have tried will let it work.

I tried a thousand variants of the vmkfstools -z command and it is the same error..

I even tried to manually create my own rdm.vmdk file and I can't get it to work without errors. I've studied on this a lot and feel like maybe if my LSI card I ordered (IBM's version of a Perc-5e), doesn't work then I am going to move on to Hyper-V, probably even if it costs money, because I like the idea of having 6 home servers all running on a single 1U server as it only draws around 350 watts most of the time.

[Samsonite801]

And to intripoon, Thanks for the pointer. I am searching and find that you may be onto something here. I am going to read a few articles about this and maybe will give the free Hyper-V 2012 a shot.

Maybe they will have full GPT support from hypervisor to bios to firmware to driver to virtual machine to OS. Either that or else maybe PCI passthrough will just work with 2+TB GPT partitions.