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...

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 backup VMWare servers

Some of you may have computer labs, or have a network at home may use VMware Server (the free one, not ESX). So I’ve been trying to rack my brains into how to backup these machines at night. Now there are some scripts out there that minimize the downtime to one minute, but they complicated and sometimes don’t work, but if you want to try go to the vmware communities. There is also backup...