** Be warned, this is totally unsupported. Only for educational purposes should this be used ** Today I was asked the question on how to create a VIB file (.vib). In our documentation it is mentioned that you can create a VIB file to add firewall rules to your ESXi host. As the .vib tool is not available yet to [...]

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. The firewall was opened up [...]

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 the “edit function” [...]

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 testlab with ESX 3.5 and [...]

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 6000:6010,tcp,in,test