VMware Paravirtual Driver - Windows 2012 Installation

One day you may find yourself installing a Windows 2012 Server and wanting to use the VMware Paravirtual driver for the vSCSI controller for the disks.  The VMware KB article on this covers this topic very well.

1. Create a new VM
2. Remove the Hard disk 1 and click OK

3. Add a Hard disk and then click Change Type for SCSI Controller Type

4. Choose VMware Paravirtual and click OK and then OK again

5. During the Windows Installation Setup, you'll need to load the VMware Paravirtual SCSI driver.  Attach the floppy image to the VM using the "Connect to floppy image on a datastore..." option.

There will be a folder named "vmimages" then "floppies" and select the "pvscsi-Windows2008.flp" file and click OK.

6. Click on Load driver and then click on Browse

7. Select the "amd64" folder under the Floppy Disk Drive

8. Click Next

9. The disk is now present and you can continue with the Windows 2012 Setup

VMware PowerCLI - Creating Standard Virtual Switches and updating VM Network Adapter Labels

In preparation to migrate ESXi hosts from one VMware vCenter 5.0 server to another VMware vCenter 5.5 server, I created this script to automate re-configuring the VM network labels to use a standard vSwitch on each ESXi server.  The script connects to the vCenter server and creates a new standard vSwitch on each ESXi host as well as assigns an available physical uplink (vmnic).  Then also creates the portgroups for each VLAN, and finally updates the VMs network lables in a given cluster.

Download - VM-UpdateVMNetworking.ps1