Managing VMWare ESX without VMWare's Windows Client Part 1

For a number of years since switching to a Mac the only need for Windows has been for the VMWare client for my home lab. This has worked reasonably well through the XP years, and survived a migration to Windows 7 even, but recently whatever Windows 10 ‘preload’ does has broken my Windows 7 VM’s while leaving them unable to upgrade to Windows 10 and finally the moment has arrived where I need to break free however painful.

VMWare Fusion Pro looks like a good way forward, but given that my next mobile device to replace my aging Macbook Pro is going to be an iPad and keyboard that doesn’t work as a way forward either. I needed something lightweight and command line.

Step forward the libvirt project and its tools - especially virsh. I do remember its inception many years ago as a way to unify management of the then iffy KVM, the likely at the time winner XEN, plus the other smaller players like lxc.

Installing virt-manager

# yum install virt-manager

Connecting to the ESX server… if like myself you don’t have a full SSL certificate authority setup you’ll need the ‘?no_verify=1’. Omit it in a production environment.

$ virsh -c esx://192.168.1.73/?no_verify=1
Enter username for 192.168.1.73 [root]: 
Enter root's password for 192.168.1.73: 
Welcome to virsh, the virtualisation interactive terminal.

Type:  'help' for help with commands
       'quit' to quit

virsh #

Connecting to the ESX server… if like myself you don’t have a full SSL certificate authority setup you’ll need the ‘?no_verify=1’. Omit it in a production environment. First thing you’re likely to need is to see what VM’s you have. In virsh parlance - ‘domains’.

virsh # list --all
 Id    Name                           State
----------------------------------------------------
 1     switch1                        running
 2     hopper                         running
 3     dns1                           running
 -     dns2                           shut off
 -     ldap1                          shut off
- - - - - - - - - - - -8< - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
 -     solweb2                        shut off
 -     solwlserv1                     shut off
 -     solwlserv2                     shut off
 -     switch2                        shut off

Next thing is you’ll need to start some of them...

virsh # start linc7web1
Domain linc7web1 started

...and of course, stop some of them.

virsh # shutdown linc7lb1
error: Failed to shutdown domain linc7lb1
error: internal error: HTTP response code 500 for call to 'ShutdownGuest'. Fault: ServerFaultCode - Cannot complete operation because VMware Tools is not running in this virtual machine.

If you see the above on a VM, install the vmware tools (e.g. yum install -y open-vm-tools).

virsh # shutdown linc7lb1
Domain linc7lb1 is being shutdown