Since vSphere has been introduced more and more of my customers are migrating to ESXi. It makes sense as the thin hypervisor is the way of the future according to VMware.
One common used argument by the admins to not use ESXi is killing a rogue VM. Normally an SSH session would be opened to the Service Console and with “kill -9” the VM would be killed when a “power off” did not work”. Because ESXi is COS-less this is not an option. However, it is still possible to kill these VMs by using the following procedure:
login in unsupported mode:
Press <alt> + <f1> and type “unsupported” <enter>
List all running VMs:
vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms
Kill VM with vm id:
vim-cmd vmsvc/poweroff <vm id>
vmware-cmd on vMA don’t do that ?
Yes, vmware-cmd on vMA or RCLI will also do it.
The only thing I don’t like about that method is one must have console access to do it. Some of our customers’ systems do not have remote console access, so heading to the datacenter every time to kill a vm is a bit tedious.
However I think the benefits of ESXi vs ESX outweigh the dwindling amount of times we need to manually kill a vm and thus with vSphere I’ve gotten them to migrate entirely to ESXi. But if VMware had a ‘supported’ and secure way to do this remotely it would be much easier to persuade customers of it’s ability.
@nitro / @fernanco , Don’t know if it ever happened to you guys but it happens that vmware-cmd just doesn’t work. (Same goes for classic ESX) this is when you need to resort to more drastic measures.
@Robert
If the beef were more with the local access and less with unsupported, you could enable SSH access via these instructions
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2008/08/10/howto-esxi-and-ssh/
I’ve used them and it works great. SFTP isn’t supported, but SCP is, and I frequently use that to transfer in iso’s for images rather than the slightly more clunky Sphere interface.
We were informed last week at a VMware gathering in Halifax NS by a VMware employee that there will be no ESX / COS as of 2011. It will be ESXi only…