Today I received the following error at a customer site when applying patch via the Update Manager:”Metadata for patch missing.” After a close inspection I noticed VirtualCenter wasn’t running on port 80 but on 81 for some reason. Opening up the ESX Firewall and restarting the VMware Update Manager service seems to fix this problem. […]

Default FastSCP isn’t working with ESX 3.5. I just noticed this download: http://www.veeam.com/download/fastscp/FastSCP.xml
It’s indeed a firewall related problem, copy this file into /etc/vmware/firewall.
Run the following command “service mgmt-vmware restart” and open up the Portrange with VirtualCenter. Opening it up can also be done from the commandline with “esxcfg-firewall -e FastSCP”. Veeam still has to fix […]

Lane Leverett pointed me out to the fact that it’s possible to add a firewall service instead of opening up a huge range or multiple ranges for one service by hand. This way a junior system engineer can easily open up a port range via VirtualCenter instead of the console. I tried this in our […]

An often made mistake when trying to open up or close a port range with the ESX(3.0.2 and 3.5) firewall is using the dash(-) as a divider. Using the dash unfortunately does not always result in an error. To open up or close a port range you should use a collon(:) as a divider:
esxcfg-firewall –openport […]