I have 5 difference vCenter servers installed over various timeframes and I am seeing different counts for the Non-Critical Host Updates across them. After some digging it appears that this is due to the Nexus 1000v updates. We have not deployed the Nexus to production yet so this was a little confusing for me. It appears that when Update Manager is installed it downloaded the patches for the Nexus 1000v, but they are not included in the updates that are downloaded because we have none running in the environment and Update Manager was not configured to download them.

As a basis for an upcoming post on splitting vmkernel traffic across over layer 3 boundaries I wanted to describe how vmkernel traffic is routed on an ESX host. There seems to be a lot of confusion in this area and hopefully this will help to clear it up. If you need a refresher on IP addresses, network masks, or subnets check out this Cisco article. Directly Connected Networks If a host is directly connected to a subnet it will use that interface to talk to devices in that subnet.

Here is a short convenience script that will simulate a persistent login to a VMware host system when using the vCLI on Windows. Typically you have to specify a lot of parameters that include login information or a session file. With this method you just run the script and provide the hostname, username, and password for the connection. After running this script you can run commands like “vicfg-mpath.pl –list” without additional parameters.

We have our service consoles set up to disallow root logins and use sudo (with password) for access. Every once in a while this causes us some pain. How do you update file /etc/filex or run some command across a cluster or a bunch hosts when root privileges are needed? There are multiple ways to approach this type of issue, but one I have not seen much of in the VMware blogosphere is clusterssh.