Johnny Zhang
vCenter has webaccess allow administrators to manage vCenter through the browser, it also accept API calls to vCenter. The web service behind it is Tomcat. You don't need to worry about the Tomcat setting since VMware ensure it will never break! :). Ok if you really want to take a look under the hood. You can!
you will need to find the file:
"C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\VirtualCenter Server\tomcat\conf\tomcat-users.xml"

and add:

Now you need to restart "Vmware Infrastracture web access" service
By default the tomcat uses port 8086
you can now open a browser point it to
http://server_name:8086/
click on "
Tomcat Manager"
Type in your user name and password. In my case is "admin"/"test"
Now you just logged into Tomcat Manager

Note: This will only work on VI3 since vSphere uses different version of tomcat.


Johnny Zhang
vMA (vSphere Management Assistant) is a very powerful tool that allow you centralize your ESX/ESXi command access. you can download it from here. Or you can import it from your vCenter (please note vMA will only run on a 64 bit host)
Deploying from URL
1.In the vSphere Client, choose Virtual Appliance > Deploy. 2.When prompted by the Wizard, click Deploy from URL and enter the following URL: http://www.vmware.com/go/importvma/vma4.ovf
You can deploy this as any other VMs. Once it deployed, you now can login as "vi-admin"
The first step is to add hosts that you want to manage with vMA
sudo vifp addserver server_name

In my case I added 2 ESX 4.0 and 2 ESX 3.5 hosts to vMA. We can list those servers by:
sudo vifp listservers

Now we can pick the server we want to manage:
vifpinit server_name
and now we can pass the command to that host.
We will talk more about vMA later
Johnny Zhang
Each ESX server will keep a list of VMotion history since it first boot up. You can find that by
cat /proc/vmware/migration/history
It will show you if the VM was migrated to this host or from this host. In my case VM1244 is migrated from this host to host 10.21.51.133. This IP is the VMotion IP address. The VMotion id is a very important part. Both hosts involved in the VMotion will have the same VMotion id. So you can track the VM from one host to another by using this id.
For example, my VMotion id is 1253064812716632. So I can use this against vmkernel logs on both hosts
On the source:
grep 1253064812716632 vmkernel
From the log we can see:
src ip = <10.21.51.132> dest ip = <10.21.51.133> Dest wid = 1111. The source will always show both VMotion IP address for source and destination hosts, it will also show the new world ID for the VM on the new host, in this case 1111.
On destination:
grep 1253064812716632 vmkernel
On destination we see:
src ip = <10.21.51.132> dest ip = <0.0.0.0> Dest wid = -1 using SHARED swap
Note, the destination IP will always show 0.0.0.0 and world id -1. Another way for us to tell this is the destination host.
We will talk about more on how to track VMotion from other files.
Johnny Zhang
Not like everyone will find this is useful, but it's just cool to know that we can do this!
Yes, you can use VNC client (Please take a note, seems like not all vnc client will connect but I tested tight vnc and it works. http://www.tightvnc.com/download.html) to connect to your VM without install a VNC server on it. all you need to do is to add some lines in your .vmx file

RemoteDisplay.vnc.enabled = "True"
Remo
teDisplay.vnc.port = "7001"
RemoteDisplay.vnc.password = "test"

You can use any port and password.

When ready, you need to connect to your ESX servers useing "
esx_server_name_or_ip:port"
the port is the port you put into your .vmx file in my case is 7001
Click on "
Connect" it will ask for the password. This my case is "test"

Click on "
Ok"
You are now connected to the VM