Category: System Administration

Bulk Upgrade VMware Tools – the manual way

VMware tools is something that significantly increase the performance of the VMs. Most of the time we tend to ignore VM tool upgrade even after ESXi host upgrades. This VM tools upgrade would be challenging if the VM count is too high, in that case we can not upgrade one VM at a time. In that case, we might need to use the batch/bulk upgrades.

In order to do bulk upgrades, we can use 2 different methods.

  1. Bulk Manual way
  2. Power CLI batch upgrade

Today, we are going to look at the Bulk Manual way

Step 01: Access the vSphere or vCenter web console and go the relevant host or cluster resource

Step 02: Go to “VMs and Templates” and click on the folder containing your VMs.

Step 03: click on the “Virtual Machines” tab. For the vSphere Web Client, click on the “Related Objects” tab and then “Virtual Machines”.

Step 04: (since you can’t do a multiple select in the left pane), click on one of the VMs you’d like to upgrade, hold Ctrl and then start clicking the other VMs.

Step 05: Now right-click on one of the VMs, then “Guest” (“Guest OS” in the Web Client), and then Install/Upgrade VMware Tools. Once the “Install/Upgrade VMware Tools” screen pops up, paste the following in the “Advanced Options” and click OK or Continue

/S /v”/qn REBOOT=R”

(this command line switch will do the silent installation without a reboot, but in order to complete the installation, a reboot is mandatory at a later maintenance window)

IIS Default Web site not working – Others work

On Windows systems there are tmes where the Default web site is not browing (even not starting), but rest of the sites are working fine.

When you try to start the Default web site, you may end up with an error code: (Exception from HRESULT:0x800704BE)

This is due to incorrect configuration of the localhost listener under the TCP/IP stack.

So to fix the issue, you simply have to follow the below steps;

Step 01 – Get current listener IP

netsh http show iplisten

If the above value is a NULL value, you may add the localhost and the required IP addresses accordinly. If a wrong IP address is showing, you may delete the value as below.

Step 02 – Deleting the in correct IP

netsh http delete iplisten ipaddress=IP ADDRESS

Step 03 – Adding the localhost and related IP addresses

netsh http add iplisten 127.0.0.1

Step 04 – Adding all the IPs to IP listener

netsh http add iplisten ipaddress=0.0.0.0

Step 05 – Restarting the IIS service