Getting Windows 8 or 2012 to work as a guest under vSphere 4.1

There have been other blogs and kbase articles that define how to get Windows 8/8.1 or Windows 2012 / 2012 R2 running under vSphere 4.1.  I plan to to offer you a complete document with references

For the guest configuration, I would choose the following:

Windows 2012 / 2012 R2
Guest OS: Windows 2008 R2
vCPU: 2
vMemory: 2GB
Network Card:  E1000

Windows 8 / 8.1
Guest OS: Windows 7 (32 or 64 to match your media)
vCPU: 2, but 1 should work
vMemory:     1GB, but 2 would be better
Network Card:    E1000

After you build the OS, but before the OS is installed the VMX file needs to be modified, so use the vSphere client to do these steps

1. Browse to the datastore where the VMX files is located
2. Download the VMX file to your windows system
3. Edit the file with a Linux compatible editor like Notepad++ and add the following lines:
1. bios440.filename = bios.440.rom
   mce.enable = "TRUE"
   cpuid.hypervisor.v0 = "FALSE"
   vmGenCounter.enable = "FALSE

Then upload the updated VMX file and the bios ROM file from this location.  If you feel a little unsure about using a random file acquired from the internet there are directions on how to extract the file from VMware Player.  I have not done this yet, but trust the ROM file that is the VMware community

Next just install the OS as normal, it should work fine, no BSOD.

Now what I have not seen is anything on VMware tools, and from what it looks like any version of the VMware tools that come with 4.1 will corrupt the video and make  it unusable, so when installing VMware tools, use the OSP version.

Here is the root location of all the tools:  http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/index.html
Here is the version that I have used successfully:  http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/5.5p01/windows/index.html
But guessing the latest which is for vSphere 6 would also work:

• 64-bit http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/latest/windows/x64/VMware-tools-windows-9.4.11-2400950.iso
• 32-bit: http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/latest/windows/x86/VMware-tools-windows-9.4.11-2400950.iso

If you want read more about OSP tools, this page is useful.

Good luck with your Window 8 / 2012 builds!!

Cracking the contents of the VMware VMU vibs files

I was patching my ESXi server today with the VMware Host Update Utility and was thinking about a couple of things.  First when I do an update the VMU first downloads a bunch of data to my C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VI Update\vmw, about 1.2GB of data.

I was thinking that if I wanted to switch back to using a scripting tool then I would have to re-download all of the patches again manually and then script it up.  So I wanted the shortcut to see if I really needed to download it again. Inside the MetaData directory, there are four zip files; 4.0 ESX and ESXi, and 4.1 ESX and ESXi. and then in the vibs directory there are a bunch of vibs files ranging from 60 to 130 MB.  Those had to be the patches.

Any search on how to open a VIBS file came up empty so I then looked at the Metadata zips again and opened them all up.  Inside there is a file called Packages.  Once I looked into it I noticed that it was all names of the patches, but was was most interesting was the filename was a .deb file.

So I renamed one of the .vibs file to a .deb copied it over to my Linux server and ran the command ar vx something.deb, and viola, it opened up and showed its contents. 

Unfortunately for me, it looks like the contents inside the .deb / .vibs file is not easily compatible the downloaded manual patches, but I learned a little more on how the VMware VMU architecture works.

What I found very interesting was that even though it was for ESXi, these are debian patch packages, so still somewhere in that tiny ESXi Hypervisor, there is some Linux, however small.

Thanks to http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/01/28/how-to-extract-rpm-or-deb-packages/ on how to extract DEB packages

Re-installation of VMware tools for Ubunutu

I needed this procedure for when I upgraded my ESX server from 3i to 4i

Do the following commands to remove the VMware tools that are already there:

cd /usr/bin
sudo .vmware-uninstall-tools.pl


Use Ubuntu community documents for installation: VMware Tools