How to kill a VM through ESX CLI

If you got an ESX that has a VM that’s stuck which means you can’t shut it down, and it’s non-responsive but it’s running like a phantom vm on the ESX host then follow these instructions. First off understand this will kill the vm process for that VM. Note this is not considered a graceful shutdown, it’s what I call a “Fat finger” the server. 1. Find the...

Exchange 2010: The Active Directory Schema is not up-to-date

If you get this error,  ”The Active Directory Schema is not up-to-date and Ldifde.exe is not installed on this computer.”. Just run ServerManagerCmd -i RSAT-ADDS in windows...

Exchange 2010 Installation: Unable to read from the metabase

Let me guess you are installing Exchange 2010 and you landed here because you keep getting this error, “Unable to read from the Metabase. Ensure that Microsoft Internet Information Services is installed”. However you’ve installed IIS on your Windows 2008 box, so what gives? You are missing just missing the IIS 6 compatibility feature. It’s a simple fix, go to your web...

How to stop some vm’s from turning on during an HA event in vmware

Okay let’s say you have 2 ESX servers running both at 70% utilization. If one server goes out, and VMware HA turns up the vm’s on the surviving ESX server you’ll get a major performace degradation on your critical servers. However you realize some of those vm’s are test machines or non-critical servers and you don’t care to have VMware HA turn on those machines. How...

How to enable root access in ESX 4.1

You have to love vmware if you are into virtualization as much as I am. ESX comes with high security and most user accessible ports either blocked or the port is closed on the firewall side. If you need to SSH into your ESX box you will need to open a port on your firewall. We are not talking about the firewall on your router, or ASA. ESX comes with a built-in firewall, you need to open a port on...