What happens when the VMware Evaluation license expires ?

Vmware almost has all the products available for 60 days evaluation period. All the features are functional and available to be tested before buying it or maybe for POC for any customer. So, what happens to the vSphere ESXi and vCenter Server after 60 days ?

vCenter Server:

Its keeps warning about the remaining time from day 1 of the evaluation period till it reached the last day like below and gives option to add the new License Key.

  

What happens to the Hosts which were added to the vCenter and the VMs running on them

1. All the hosts gets disconnect and it wont allow you to add existing or new hosts to vCenter Server.
   

2. All the Virtual Machines remain intact and running.

When you connect to the ESXi host using vSphere Client, web-Client required vCenter Server, hence you need vSphere Client to access you r VMs on host that has expired license

1. The moment you connect to the ESXi host, you are welcomed with this pop-up window.
   

2. All the VMs are still running and accessible, they are can be restarted.
   
3. New VMs can be created but cannot assign more than 4vCPU also remember that this is running on ESXi 5.0 mode as we are connected using vSphere Client. 
   
4. It behaves somewhat like free ESXi which runs as standalone host and which cannot be added to vCenter and without any advanced features. But Free ESXi has better configuration maximums in terms of CPU and Memory assignment to VMs.

Nested Virtualization in vSphere 5.5 (Lab Purpose Only) 7 Simple Steps

Nested Virtualization is nothing but running Virtual Machine inside a Virtual Machine. So there are two layers of Hypervisors and on top of that the vSphere Environment is built. After Installing ESXi on a Physical Server, we get lot of Hardware independence, where resources can be optimized and over-committed but if you just have one physical server then you wouldn't be able to test all the Vmware features (like vMtoion, HA, DRS) which are only available if you have required hardware like shared storage, Distributed Virtual Switch etc.

The above picture shows two layers of Virtualization (ESXi) on single Physical Server and a filer is used to present local storage as shared storage to both ESXi Virtual Machines. Which is same as shared storage presented to two Physical Servers.

In my case I have 2 physical servers with pretty good configuration and local storage. I am using Nested Virtualization where I will run two ESXi Virtual Machines and a Filer to present local storage a shared storage. In total I will have 4 ESXi hosts with shared storage.

Please follow the below steps to configure Nested Virtualization on ESXi 5.5

1. Create a New Virtual Machine using "Web-Client only".

2. During configuration wizard select "Compatible with - ESXi 5.5 and Later".

3. Select Guest OS Family as "Linux" and Guest OS Version as "Other Linux (64-bit)".

4. During Customizing hardware section - Important

    Under CPU - " Check Hardware Virtualization"

    (this option let you power on Virtual Machine inside a Virtual Machine)

5. Set the other resources i.e., Memory, CPU appropriately and complete the Virtual Machine creation.

6. To get the Networking on the nested Virtual Machines, enable "promiscuous mode" for the Virtual Machine portGroup of the ESXi host just installed.

In Web-Client:

>> Select the Host (On which the Virtual Machine was created)

>> Click on Manage >> Virtual Switch and then click on Edit button of   vSwitch.

7. You can also configure VLAN by just setting the VLAN to 4095. Also make sure setting are also modified on the physical switch accordingly          (access/trunk for VLAN 4095).

Nested Virtualization can be further extended and you can have next level of Virtualization on top of second layer and so on like the movie Inception, dream inside a dream. This feature is amazing to test all the vSphere features as well as most of the VMware products on one or two high configuration physical server. Hope this post was helpful.

Fatal Error 6: (Buffer too small)

This was my first error message which I received during my lab setup. Where I was trying to install ESXi 5.5 in a Virtual Machine which was running on ESXi 5.5. I am setting up Nested Virtualization, so that I can get more flexibility to use all the Vmware features which are not possible if I use the normal Virtualization (One layer of ESXi) on a single physical server. I will blog about Nested Virtualization in the next blog.

During installation of ESXi 5.5, I received this error message within few seconds.

Resolution:

This error occurred while loading the module /sb.v00 of ESXi 5.5, which indicates some problem with the Image, i.e., the ISO image downloaded from Vmware website (in my case).

I tried downloading again (on Server 2008 R2) and installing it several time with no luck. I used both vSphere Client and Web Client to upload the media to Datastore.

I then downloaded the same image on Windows 8 and uploaded again and this time it worked!!! The problem was with the media but I couldn’t find the reason why it was not working from Server 2008 R2.  I then used Md5Checker software to check the MD5 value and match it with the MD5 value of the image on Vmware Website. I was getting a different MD5 whenever downloaded on Server 2008 R2. This was the first time I faced this issue on Server 2008 R2, it worked perfectly for other ISOs. 

It is very easy to check the MD5 value after downloading the image from any website. VMware provides MD5 value for each download  on the same page

There are many free software available to check MD5 value, I used md5checker (I got this first when I searched, not promoting) and just a drag and drop of the downloaded image provides the MD5 value

Conclusion:  This issue happens because of the bad/corrupted ISO image, either download it again or try downloading it on other machine.

Modify vCenter Server Appliance Network Configurations from Command line

There could be scenarios where you have to change the IP address of vCenter Server Appliance. This can be done by two ways

1. Using the vCenter Server Appliance configuration page, i.e., by going to

              https://appliance_ip:5480

             and then select the Network tab and then Address tab

2. From command line.

Like, in my case, I am using Physical servers from cloud provider, where I am getting the IP which is publicly not accessible.

In this case I cannot open the configuration page using the first method. For that I have to make the changes from command line.

When you go to the Virtual Machine console of vCenter Server Appliance, there is no Networking settings available

Follow the below steps to change the network setting

1. Login - default

             Username - root

             Password - vmware

2. Type the below command and hit enter, that brings up the new menu

              /opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_config_net

3. To enter a static IP address, press 6 and follow the instructions accordingly

4. Similarly, other entries like Default Gateway, DNS etc can be modified by going to respective options

I hope this was helpful.