How to install vmware tools on brand new virtual machine using powercli? - powercli

how to install vmware tools on a newly build vm which is not in a domain and doesnot have an IP address assigned.
invoke-vmscript or invoke-command are not working.

Invoke-VMScript uses VMware Tools to run commands locally on the Guest OS, so that will not work in this scenario.
I'm afraid there won't be much to help you automate the process, but there are some things you can do to limit the amount of time spent on each system. Example: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Tools/10.1.0/com.vmware.vsphere.vmwaretools.doc/GUID-7E1225DC-9CC6-401A-BE40-D78110F9441C.html

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Is it possible to run SikuliX on a host computer and have the script interact with virtual machine?

Currently running Windows 10 (native) and VMware Workstation 12 Player. I am running various LTS releases of Ubuntu in VMware.
I am wondering if there is way for me to run SikuliX on my main OS, Windows 10, and have the script interact with a virtual machine, running an Ubuntu OS, that I have open.
The quickstart documentation on the download site isn't very specific about the limitations of SikuliX on this topic. It simply says that you can't run it on a headless system (which VMware is not), and you need to have a monitor - the only problem is that I have no idea if SikuliX considers VMware to be a legitimate monitor or not.
I am aware of the fact that you can install Sikulix on the virtual machine itself, but this is not preferable as I would have to possibly reconfigure my VM settings to allocate more memory OR just deal with running the script at a slower pace.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
The answer is yes, if you run SikuliX on a native host, it is possible to interact with the the interface of the virtual machine the same as running SikuliX on the virtual machine itself.
Now that I think about it, I should have probably tested this out before posting the question, but hey, if anyone has the same question as I do, now you know.

open vm tools fails to customize guest

I am trying to deploy a cent-os 7 VM on a vcenetr from pyvmomi python library and then before powering on the VM I am trying to setup static IP and DNS for the VM.
VM creation goes fine , but guest customization fails, givimg following error:
**Customization of the guest operating system 'rhel6_64Guest' is not sup
ported in this configuration. Microsoft Vista (TM) and Linux guests with Logical
Volume Manager are supported only for recent ESX host and VMware Tools versions
. Refer to vCenter documentation for supported configurations."
faultCause =
faultMessage = (vmodl.LocalizableMessage) []
uncustomizableGuestOS = 'rhel6_64Guest'
Now this customization problem goes away if the VM is just rebooted once. After that we can do the guest customization.
But this reboot takes around 30 seconds of time and for our case , we need to get VMs up and running faster than this time.
Any body who faces similar problem and has some context on it will be very helpful.
Also I don't understand how rebooting the VM solves this problem.
Please share your thoughts even if you don't have exact solutions .
On further Investigation I found that open-vm-tools does not work until the VM is powered on atleast once.
When Machine is powered on , the HOST system detects the open-vm-tools running on guest OS , and from there on open-vm-tools works.
So open-vm-tools can not be used for initial provisioning as it will just not work at the start up.
Cloud-init is the alternative solution which should be used for initial provisioning.

Accessing Dev Environment from another VM (Virtualbox)

On my OSX machine I have two VM's running:
Development Environment (aka DE) (Linux)
Testing Environment (aka TE) (Win7 IE9)
In my TE, I would like to be able to access a server running on my DE. Pretty straight forward sounding but I'm sort of new.
I'm using Virtualbox as my client on both machines. My dev environment is a vagrant box setup with puppet. I can modify it with virtualbox as well for now. SIMPLEST solution wins. I have tried nested-boxing, it doesn't work :P
I was able to achieve the desired results much more easily than I had anticipated. I had to add the same lines I added to my local machine to my VM.

How to automatically replicate a running VM on ESXi to a computer running locally VMWare Player or VMWare Fusion?

The specific use case I'm dealing in our company is the following:
On a ESXi server, a dedicated VM is running to host a demo environment of a software solution. This demo environment is maintained updated by the development and maintenance team.
At specific points in time, people form sales need to take with them a copy of the latest demo environment (the VM) on their laptop to make customer's demos/presentations.
I wonder if there is a tool to automate this kind of operation silently.
Yes there is.
VMware themself make a product called vCenter Converter which is available here http://www.vmware.com/uk/products/converter/
When using the standalone client choose to convert..
Source : VMware Infrastructure virtual machine
Destination : VMware Workstation or Other VMWare Virtual Machine
You should then be able to open in in Player or Fusion.
*This will require the VMs to be off, if you don't want to turn them off you could clone them first (only available if you aren't using the free ESXi Hypervisor - thus the paid one)
Hope this helps :)

One click virtual machine demo?

I want to give a demo for my customers use virtual machine, but I don't want the customer to install the virtual machine software, can I make a demo which bundle the virtual machine software and my virtual machine, then just a click to run the virtual machine. It will be cool. is there any tool can do that?
I'm not aware of a virtual machine that doesn't need to be installed. If using Windows, the Microsoft Virtual PC is a relatively compact, free, quick-to-install option for a VM.
One other option would be to install an OS and your demo onto a USB flash drive. As long as the computer used can boot from USB (which is pretty common in newer computers), then you can have complete control over the OS in this fashion.
EDIT: Sun VirtualBox is free VM software. You do have to install it, but I've found that it works well, plus it's free.
You could try using Portable VirtualBox as per this forum thread. I have not tried it myself but it seems like some people have had luck with it.