I left this one critical piece off my “Me Too” vSphere 4 Update 1 post, and wasn’t reminded of it again until today. From the PlanetVMware blog:

In case you didn’t notice, Update 1 for VMware vCenter Server 4.0 was released last week. This is great news for all of you who wish to run the vSphere client on Windows 7 machines.

While we had a KB article (Cannot launch vSphere Client after installing in Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 (1011329)) which went through a couple of different incarnations as new information became available, we can now put this problem behind us. No work-arounds are necessary, it just works now.

Re-read that last bit. No more workarounds. It just works. Woot!

First a picture of this in action:

(Click the pic for full size)

Wow. It’s actually a nice little overview of what is doing what on that particular host, at a given time. You can break it down by VM, and set the time range from real time on up. This is provided by the ‘VMware Virtual Center Management Webservices” service on the vCenter host, The fact that it is provided by a web service makes this even more interesting, and worthy of further investigation.

Leave me any questions or comments in the comments section, or via Twitter

While playing in the “Lab” today I found a section in the vSphere client, under “Configuration” called “IPMI/iLO Settings”:

Being an inquisitive fool, I clicked it and then properties:

It seems this will let you get/set the IPMI or iLO settings for the server. Unfortunately my home lab does not support either.

I’m lazy. Very lazy, in fact. I’m also fairly sure that you are too. How many times a day do you connect to different vCenter servers? Do you type your password each time? If you do, for shame! Today while playing with vCenter Server for vSphere I found that the following parameters still work with the vSphere client (the new VI Client:

-passthroughAuth -s virtualcenter.domain.local

You would put these here:

The entire like would look like this:

"C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\VpxClient.exe" -passthroughAuth -s virtualcenter.domain.local

I found the instructions for the VI Client at VMAdmin.co.uk.

No I’m not kidding either. Found this via Twitter last evening in fact. There is now a Twitter plugin for the VI client. Not sure how much use it is, but it shows how flexible the plugin stuff can really get. Go to the source and check it out yourself.

This is one of those settings that you only find when you need. Today, I needed it. While writing another post, I decided to go back and get the text of an error that I encountered.

This can be done in the VIC by editing the client settings, and then “Lists” in order to grab more (or less) events. Take a look: