service console

Changing the Service Console IP address in VMWare ESX Server

Hi folks, have you ever setup ESX server and set the IP just to find out later that it’s taken and you have to change it? I have, and I have to say I hate it when that happens.

Luckily there is an easy way to resolve this. With the proper command line commands you can quickly change the IP address of the service console.

Just connect to the console of the ESX server and at the shell prompt type in: esxcfg-vswif -d vswif0

This deletes the existing vswif0 and it will give you a message about “nothing to flush”. You can safely ignore this.

Then type in: esxcfg-vswif -a vswif0 -p Service\ Console -i 192.168.1.5 255.255.255.0 -b 192.168.1.255

That will recreate the vswif0 with the IP 192.168.1.5. You can of course use whatever IP and subnet mask you wish. The last address is the broadcast address.

If you have changed the IP of the service console to a new subnet then you will also have to change the default gateway. You can edit the file “network” in the directory /etc/sysconfig. Just use the vi editor to update the file and save it.

After all of this is done, restart the entire ESX server and that should fix it.

-RP

VMWare to offer ESXi for Free

Hi folks, if you haven’t already heard the exciting news, VMWare is going to be offering their ESXi product for free starting July 28th! This is obviously being done to compete with Microsoft’s Hyper-V. This is great news in my opinion as it will really foster great competition between the two products and can only result in both companies putting out better products for the consumer in the long run. You can read more about it here in eWeek’s article.

 One of the questions I’ve received is what is ESXi 3.5 and how does it differ from VMWare’s other product ESX 3.5? The major difference is that ESXi 3.5 has a small footprint of only 32MB and it doesn’t have a service console like ESX 3.5 has. This means that a lot of agents (like backup agents) that rely on the service console to run will not work with ESXi 3.5. However as the product matures we will see more and more support for it. In the meantime you can still run backups as you normally would on a physical server. 

 Here is a link to a knowledge base article at VMWare that also explains some of the features that are not present in ESXi 3.5.

-RP