During the VCDX Defense panels one of the candidates mentioned using lock down mode for ESXi to add an extra layer of security. It seems that there is a common misunderstanding about the lockdown mode. Here’s how our documentation describes it: Enabling lockdown mode disables all direct root access to ESXi machines. Any subsequent local changes to the host must be [...]

Something that a lot of people haven’t looked in to or just don’t think about is relocating the log files of vCenter, I wrote a short article 2 years ago and thought it was time to reiterate it. By default (Windows 2003) log files are stored in “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\Logs”, and for Windows 2008 log files are [...]

I just finished installing vSphere ESXi 4.0 update 1, I used all the default settings. I expected that all my portgroups would inherit all their settings from the vSwitch that was configured during installation… unfortunately this is not the case as can be seen in the screenshots below. Default install with no redundancy: VM Network inherits from vSwitch: Management Network [...]

We had an interesting discussion on one of the internal mailing lists this week. Someone asked what the general opinion was about disabling Tech Support. Of course some said disabling should not be a problem, but many also disagreed. The reason for this is simple: Support. When Tech Support is disabled it removes the option to login to the console [...]

Rodos just reported on twitter that it looks like Boot From SAN is supported for ESXi. Unfortunately the KB article Rodos refers to in his tweet, kb.vmware.com/kb/1015000, is incorrect and Boot From SAN is not supported for ESXi. I’ve already reported this internally and hopefully the KB article will be fixed soon. The correct statement can be found in the [...]

I received a question from a customer who wanted, for security reasons, to remove the ESXi web welcome screen. This is the screen that enables you to download the vSphere Client and RCLI and even browse datastores. I’ve tested it and removing (or renaming) the following file will lead to a blank page when the ESXi host is accessed via [...]

I was just figuring something out from the command line on an ESXi 4.0 host. I needed to mount a partition but a regular “mount” did not work so it took me a couple of seconds to realize why. The solution was simple and similar to the regular mount command: /usr/bin/busybox mount also might come in handy: /usr/bin/busybox fdisk -l [...]