Fast way to collect vCenter information
Johnny Zhang
From time to time, you may want to know how many ESX servers in your vCenter, what are their build levels, how many VMs are registered, how many powered on, etc. There is a fast way to give you all those information. All you need to look is the vpxd-profiler.log on your vCenter server. This log is in the same directory as your vpxd.log file

for example on a Windows 2008 server the log is at
\Users\All Users\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\Logs\

What you need look for is the "InventoryStats". You are going to see something like this
those logs update every 5 minutes, you can show your boss, you are on top of things.

Note: this log can be large enough to hung notepad or wordpad. I do suggest you to move to a Linux to read it.
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How to setup sudo with active directory accounts in ESX 4.1
Johnny Zhang
Customer using Active directory integration function in 4.1. the user logged in is DOMAIN/user_name, and since the user is not in the sudoer file, they can not view logs

You can add AD groups into sudoer file
for example, you have a domain called "MYDOMAIN" and the group call "ESX Admins" (or MYDOMAIN\ESX Admins)
you add this under group %wheel:
%MYDOMAIN//ESX/ Admins ALL=(ALL) ALL
Note: if it did not prompt for password, you may need to restart the server, and everything will work from here)
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Change virtaul hardware version from 7 back to 4
Johnny Zhang
Some times customers may want to change the virtual hardware version back from 7 to 4, there is a way to do this

the first is the VM's vmx file
the part you need to change is:

virtualHW.version = "7" you change this to
virtualHW.version = "4"

No need to change config.version = "8" since ESX 3.x already using this version

Next what you need to change is:
scsi0.virtualDev = "lsisas1068"

this is default for version 7 of the virtual hardware. Version 4 will not understand this virtual controller

You can change to
scsi0.virtualDev = "lsilogic"

The next step is change the .vmdk file of the VM (pointer file)
ddb.virtualHWVersion = "7"

you need to change this to
ddb.virtualHWVersion = "4"

and after that, you should able to power on the VM as hardware version 4

(please note, this is not supported by VMware)
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