The prerequisities are having SSH enabled, copy the Offline Bundles to a datastore and enter Maintenance mode. Although the last one is optional.
Here is another video I've recorded during the beta phase of VMware vSphere 5.5. Its an installation and configuration of the vCSA, together with DNS and IP configuration.
With the Copy-DatastoreItem cmdlet it is easy to clone the files of a VM, but this kind of copy doesn’t know about the different types of VirtualDisk you can have in a VM. As a result, your Thin vdisks become Thick vDisks in the clone. The function in this post avoids that problem by using the VirtualDiskManager for copying the VMDK.
"With the release of vSphere 5.1, the network namespace in ESXCLI has been enhanced to include a comprehensive set network statistics at various points in the virtual network. This enables a vSphere administrator to easily get an overall status of the vSphere network as well as provide the ability to drill down further for troubleshooting."
"If you copy a vmdk from a ESXi system via ‘cp’ or anything similar, your so called sparse-vmdk, will blow up to the maximum size which was defined.
For example, a VM with a 25G partition shows up with 25G but needs only the space which consumes the data you really have."
multi-clone.py
This script can be used to deploy multiple VMs from a template in an automatic way, with the possibility to add a post script. The post script gets two parameters: the VM name and possibly the IP address (either IPv4 or IPv6, depending on the parameters)
PySphere
Python API for interaction with the vSphere Web Services SDK.
How do you update the VMware Tools without updating vSphere/ESXi?
This article presents best practices for Linux timekeeping. These recommendations include specifics on the particular kernel command line options to use for the Linux operating system of interest. There is also a description of the recommended settings an
"This site is dedicated to the VMware Virtual SAN Technology and the different ways to implement VSAN in your infrastructure. "
Clone or migration operations that involve non-VMFS virtual disks on ESXi fail with an error
"7 out of 10 UPS-es I come across are APC UPS-es and APC has some nice management software to automated server shutdown.
To automate the shutdown of your virtual machines and ESXi hosts you will need"
"I mainly run ovftool in either the vMA or on my OSX desktop. When performing an import, the OVF files are local on the same system that has the ovftool installed."