vsphere51

In the vSphere Web Client the “Use Windows session authentication” is grayed out

When logging in the vSphere Web Client login page the “Use Windows session Authentication” check box is grayed out. To solve this you need to install the Client Integration Plug-in.

The Client  Integration Plug-in provides:

  • Access to the VM console
  • Deploy OVF or OVA templates
  • Transfer files with the datastore browser
  • Use Windows Session authentication

Without the VMware Client Integration Plug-in, the “Use Windows session Authentication” check box is grayed out (1) in the vSphere Web Client login page.

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After installing the VMware Client Integration Plug-in (2) from the vSphere Web Client login page, the Use Windows session Authentication check box option can be checked and the current login setting are used in the vSphere Web Client.

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Windows 2008 R2 VMs fail to backup with VMware Data Protection (VDP)

When using VMware Data Protection (VDP) 5.1 and want to backup Windows 2008 R2 VM’s you should  disable application-consistent quiescing. On the moment the VADP API doesn’t support Windows 2008 R2 application-consistent quiescing. So be sure that servers that uses a database such as SQL and Exchange are backuped with other third party backup software else the database will be not consistent when restoring!

If you don’t disable application-consistent quiescing the backup of the Windows 2008 R2 will probably fail. I experienced this problem by customers who are using VDP and wanted to backup Windows 2008 R2 VMs.

To disable application quiescing use the following steps (This example is based on the vSphere Client but the vSphere Web client can be used to):

  • Shut Down the VM
  • Edit the settings of the VM, go to the Options tab – go to General and click on Configuration Parameters box

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  • Look if the disk.EnableUUId parameter exist. If not Add a new row with this parameter.
  • Change the value of the disk.EnableUUId parameter to false

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  • Click
  • Power On the VM

After changing the disk.EnableUUId  parameter to false the backup of the Windows 2008 R2 succeeded with VDP. If you have a lot of VMs you can use PowerCLI to automate this process.

Update VMware tools without reboot

Update February 22, 2013: William Lam created a clarification on the Zero-Down Time) VMware Tools Upgrade. Here is a quote from the post:

Is there downtime when upgrading to future versions of VMware Tools?

It depends. If one or more components have been updated since the last VMware Tools upgrade or one of the VMware Tools components requests a system reboot, then a reboot will be required. The following VMware KB http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2015163 has been created to help identify the components that would require a reboot. A reboot would not be require if only the base components of VMware Tools have been upgraded (e.g. no PVSCSI, VMXNET3). You can refer to the above KB for components that require a reboot.

More information can be found here.

Update December 24, 2012:

One of the cool new features of vSphere 5.1 is that you can update the VMware tools without the requirement  to reboot each Virtual Machine (VM). It is called zero-downtime upgrade for VMware Tools.

When upgrading from a early version of vSphere such as 4.x and 5 the VMware tools  update still needs a reboot when updating. Once you are on ESXi 5.1 and updating all the VMs to the latest VMware tools, no reboots will be required for subsequent VMware Tools upgrades!

To make this work you need at least VMware tools 9.0.0 build-782409.

In this example I upgraded first the vCenter server 5.1 to 5.1.0B and installed the latest patches on all the ESXi 5.1 hosts (build 914609) in the cluster. After the upgrade of all VMware ESXi  5.1 hosts, the VMware tools versions of all the VMs reports that the are Out-of-date. This is tested with versions 9.0 Build 782409 of the VMware tools.

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In the vSphere client, click VM in the virtual machine menu, then click Guest > Install/Upgrade VMware Tools and click OK.

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Choose Automatic Tools Upgrade for an unattended upgrade.

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After some time the VMware tools are updated the latest version without a reboot! This example can be a good business case for upgrading  to vSphere 5.1!