Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
name, IP address, and current ESXi host. Figure 9.21 shows a screen shot of this information for
the Windows Server 2012 VM into which we installed VMware Tools earlier.
Figure 9.21
You can view details
about VMware
Tools, DNS name,
IP address, and
so forth from the
Summary tab of a
VM object.
In the event you are upgrading to vSphere 5.5 from a previous version of VMware vSphere,
you will have outdated versions of VMware Tools running in your guest OSes. You'll want to
upgrade these in order to get the latest drivers. In Chapter 4, “vSphere Update Manager and the
vCenter Support Tools,” we discuss the use of vSphere Update Manager to assist in this process,
but you can also do it manually.
For Windows-based guest OSes, the process of upgrading VMware Tools is as simple as
right-clicking a VM and selecting All vCenter Actions
Upgrade VMware Tools.
Select the option labeled Automatic Tools Upgrade, and click OK. vCenter Server will install the
updated VMware Tools and automatically reboot the VM, if necessary.
For other guest OSes, upgrading VMware Tools typically means running through the install
process again. You can refer to the instructions for installing VMware Tools on SLES previously
in this chapter, for example, for information on upgrading VMware Tools in a Linux VM.
Creating VMs is just one aspect of managing VMs. In the next sections we look at some addi-
tional VM management tasks.
Guest OS
Managing Virtual Machines
In addition to creating VMs, there is a range of other tasks that vSphere administrators will
need to perform. While most of these tasks are relatively easy to i gure out, we include them
here for completeness.
Adding or Registering Existing VMs
Creating VMs from scratch, as described previously, is only one way of getting VMs into the
environment. It's entirely possible that you, as a vSphere administrator, might receive pre-
created VMs from another source. Suppose you receive the i les that compose a VM—notably,
the VMX and VMDK i les—from another administrator and you need to put that VM to use in
your environment. You've already seen how to use the vSphere Web Client-based i le browser
to upload i les into a datastore, but what needs to happen once it's in the datastore? In this case,
 
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