vCenter and it's plug-ins' log locations
Johnny Zhang
There are times you just want to find where are all those logs are (Don't we all hope all the logs in a centralized location for us?)

Here are the list of default log locations for vCenter and some of the plug-ins

vCenter
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware
VirtualCenter\Logs\*

Web server component of VirtualCenter
C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\VirtualCenter Server\tomcat\logs\*

License manager (For vCenter which manage the ESX 3.x servers)
C:\WINDOWS\Temp\lmgrd.log

VMware Update Manager
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware
Update Manager\Logs\*

VMware Update Manager UMDS
C:\Windows\Temp\vmware-downloadservice-log4cpp

VMware Enterprise Converter
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware
Converter Enterprise\Logs\*

VMware Guided Consolidation
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware
Capacity Planner\Logs\*

Vi client
C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\VMware
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How to check datastore information from a ESX host
Johnny Zhang
If you are on a ESX host service console (ESX 3.x or ESX 4.0), you want to run a quick summary on the data stores this host can see, but either don't have access to VI client or just simplely lazy to launch it, you can get that by typing
vmware-vim-cmd hostsvc/datastore/listsummary

You can got more about a specific datastore by
vmware-vim-cmd hostsvc/datastore/info datastore_name
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Prevent change on your VM's configuration file
Johnny Zhang
Some guest OS processes can send information to ESX or ESXi hosts via vmware tools, it's called setinfo messages, those messages will write to VM's configuration file known as .vmx file. If you want to restrict this, you can add "isolation.tools.setinfo.disable = "True"" on your .vmx file.
Please keep in mind after you set this, you will not see the VM's ip adress, DNS name etc from either ESX server or vCenter since those information will not pass to the host through vmware tools.
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