tankman1989
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I'm pretty new to ESXi but have used the VMware Player for a little longer and I have to say that both products are pretty amazing!
For those who don't know a lot about ESXi, it may seem totally proprietary and be it's own system but what I have found is that it is very similar to Linux in many ways, especially the CL, file structure and file system management. I'm a big supporter of how ESXi works for a number of reasons, especially with the advancement of multi-core processors and the growth in size of both mechanical and SSD drives. This makes creating an entire computer or copying one, as easy as moving a few files!
ESXi has built in features to copy to an from the machine and its "datastores" or what used to be called hard drives on servers. The built in features work but they leave a little to be desired on a few issues so I did some digging.
ESXi has a built in SSH server support so you can connect with PuTTy using the same credentials that you use with the VMware vSphere client. From this you can navigate the OS directories and look at the datastores and such. Standard Linux commands seems to apply here, some may not be installed though. By default, the SSH service is not enabled or started but it can be started manually or on boot. To access this open vSphere client and select the machine to which you want to connect in the left panel -> click on the "Configuration" tab -> under the "Software" topics select "Security Profile" -> click the "properties" (in blue lettering towards the top right) -> Select "SSH" and then click the "Options" button. Here you can choose to have it started on Host boot, or manually. Here's what it looks like:
Once SSH is running you can use it as any other machine running SSH! If you want to copy/clone a VM you can do it very easily using standard Linux commands which some might find easier than using the VMware GUI.
File Transfer Programs other than built in ones. I don't like the built in up/download features for the datastores so I choose to use WinSCP which will resume broken downloads and show speeds and such, a few things the built in options don't have. You just connect to it using the IP address listed for the host, navigate to the datastore: /vmfs/volume and within this is the various datastores that you created. The default name is "datastore". You can upload and download to this location.
So have you found any other interesting tricks that you want to share with us?
For those who don't know a lot about ESXi, it may seem totally proprietary and be it's own system but what I have found is that it is very similar to Linux in many ways, especially the CL, file structure and file system management. I'm a big supporter of how ESXi works for a number of reasons, especially with the advancement of multi-core processors and the growth in size of both mechanical and SSD drives. This makes creating an entire computer or copying one, as easy as moving a few files!
ESXi has built in features to copy to an from the machine and its "datastores" or what used to be called hard drives on servers. The built in features work but they leave a little to be desired on a few issues so I did some digging.
ESXi has a built in SSH server support so you can connect with PuTTy using the same credentials that you use with the VMware vSphere client. From this you can navigate the OS directories and look at the datastores and such. Standard Linux commands seems to apply here, some may not be installed though. By default, the SSH service is not enabled or started but it can be started manually or on boot. To access this open vSphere client and select the machine to which you want to connect in the left panel -> click on the "Configuration" tab -> under the "Software" topics select "Security Profile" -> click the "properties" (in blue lettering towards the top right) -> Select "SSH" and then click the "Options" button. Here you can choose to have it started on Host boot, or manually. Here's what it looks like:
Once SSH is running you can use it as any other machine running SSH! If you want to copy/clone a VM you can do it very easily using standard Linux commands which some might find easier than using the VMware GUI.
File Transfer Programs other than built in ones. I don't like the built in up/download features for the datastores so I choose to use WinSCP which will resume broken downloads and show speeds and such, a few things the built in options don't have. You just connect to it using the IP address listed for the host, navigate to the datastore: /vmfs/volume and within this is the various datastores that you created. The default name is "datastore". You can upload and download to this location.
So have you found any other interesting tricks that you want to share with us?
