Monday, March 17, 2014

VMware Tools Beat Down My PVS-ed Servers

Citrix PVS is a magical technology that allows the OS to be streamed to you servers/desktops but it has a weak spot.  In PVS the network equals the disk.  My VMware goon was performing patching on my ESXi host and one of the patches included updated VMware tools.  VMware is configured to automatically update tools by default when the VMs start back up.  I ended up with servers full of VMs that would boot up and work for a minute or so and then lock up hard.  In troubleshooting, I discovered the tools CD was mounted on every box.  Two ways to avoid this.

Disable updating the tools in the VMware Update Manager

Tag the VMs with "No Update" via PowerCli

Foreach ($v in ( Get-Cluster "<CLUSTER NAME>" | get-vm)) {
$vm = $v | Get-View
$vmConfigSpec = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineConfigSpec
$vmConfigSpec.Tools = New-Object VMware.Vim.ToolsConfigInfo
$vmConfigSpec.Tools.ToolsUpgradePolicy = "manual"
$vm.ReconfigVM($vmConfigSpec)

}

Good night and good luck...

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