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I am gonna upgrade out ESX4-hosts to u1 and i came across this problem. One of the VMs would not vmotion to another host. I am getting this error

“Migrate virtual machine ubuntu02.domain.tld The operation is not allowed in the current state.”

The thing that was wierd was, that it was only that VM that had the problem. The CPU and memory-usage counter showed 0. So i tried reinstalling vmware tools and reboot. Nothing helped.

I found the solution here

service mgmt-vmware restart

and

service vmware-vpxa restart

solved the problem

I had to add another harddrive to a test VM and wondered how to take advantage of thin provisioning in linux. On Windows VM’s you have to do a “Quick Format” to use thin provisioning. Here is what you do on a linux (ubuntu) VM.

1. Shutdown the VM (if you dont have Hotadd-feature licensed)
2. Add a new harddrive with thin provisioning
3. Start the VM
4. Log in
5. Check the dmesg to find the devicename of the new harddrive ( in my case /dev/sdb )
6. sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb (use another mkfs-command to use the filesystem of your choise)
7. /dev/sdb is entire device, not just one partition!
   Proceed anyway? (y,n) y
8. Wait for it to finish
9. Mount the harddrive (sudo mount /dev/sdb /home/newharddrive)

This is the way it worked for me

1. Upgrade all apps (sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade)
2. Reboot
3. Upgrade the kernel (sudo apt-get dist-upgrade)
4. Reboot
5. Install new kernel headers ( sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` )
6. Choose “Install/update vmware tools” in the VI-client
7. Mount the CD (sudo mkdir /mnt/cdrom && sudo mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom )
8. Copy the tar to your homefolder ( cp /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-x.x.x-yyyyyy.tar.gz /home/username)
9. Untar (cd /home/username && tar zxvf VMwareTools-x.x.x-yyyyyy.tar.gz)
10. Install the upgrade (sudo /home/username/vmware-tools-distrib/vmware-install.pl)
11. Follow the instructions on the screen
12. Reboot

Done

Is now ver 0.3

Download

After I upgraded from ESX 3.5 to 4.0 I also upgraded the virtual hardware from V4 to V7. That meaning the some of the virtual hardware in the vm had to be reinstalled. In Windows 2008 server it installed a new NIC called “Local Area Connection 2″ with the E1000-driver. Some services like DNS did not like that. I fixed it by adding another NIC (VMXNET3) and adding the former IP. Then I deleted the E1000-NIC.

For the console:
User: root
Password: vmw@re

For the backup appliance
User: vmware
Password: vmware

I recently upgraded to Vsphere an began upgrading VMware tools. I had a problem on a Windows 2008 VM, that would not install the new version of VMware tools. I could not uninstall the old version either. I found this solution.

1) Switch to the CD-ROM with the VMware Tools ISO mounted.
2) Run setup.exe /c to do a manually removal of the registry keys from the previous VMware Tools version
3) Re-run the setup.

Check out the changelog