I really would think before trying this in any form of production environment. It did however work for a VMware lab I was building today (05/04/2022). The issue occurred when upgrading esxi from 6.0 to 6.5 by booting to the install media. One machine worked as expected, the other for some unknown reason would only allow a new install, not an upgrade. After a very small amount of research I found this.

As of the 25/06/12 you need to use the bloody release and will also need to have a floppy drive attached. You can add the floppy drive through the VMware gui or add the following to your vmx file: floppy0.fileType = "file" floppy0.fileName = "path_to_/floppy_image/Omni.flp" floppy0.clientDevice = "FALSE" floppy0.startConnected = "FALSE" If you want to create a virtual floppy image then use the following on Os X: touch path_to_/floppy_image/Omni.flp I’m not sure you need to point to a real image, however if you are using the Fusion gui, it requires you to have one.

Vmware Fusion already includes a basic preboot execution environment (pxe) firmware. It is however possible to load other pxe firmwares into Fusion just like flashing ROMs into real network adapters. Two examples of pxe compliant boot loaders are gpxe and ipxe. Ipxe seems to be based on gpxe but they have generally similar features sets. These features include DNS, HTTP, iSCSI chainloading and more. To access these extra features we need to get hold of the ROM files which can be downloaded from here (right click and choose save as):

This is a catchy title, but if you are interested in playing with Hyper-V 3 then add the following to your virtual machine vmx file: vhv.enable = TRUE hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = FALSE mce.enable = TRUE Once you have added these lines you are good to install the Beta and add the Hyper-V 3 Role. If you miss out the ‘mce.enable’ line, when you reboot after adding the Hyper-V role you get a blue screen with an error complaining about hal_initialization_failed, so make sure you include it.

Windows device manager does not always allow you to see old adapters once the hardware has been removed. You can enable it to do so but when you are dealing with large numbers of virtual machines you need another approach. Devcon can enable you to do this and can be found here if you are after the 32bit version. However there is no 64bit version (just the 32bit & itanium version).

VMware has a tool called ovftool. You need to do a full, custom install of Fusion to get the ovf tool. It is located in: /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/ovftool Change to this directory and run the following to see examples: ./ovftool –help examples``` To run a basic conversion use: ./ovftool path_to_ovf_file.ovf /output_directory/ This will convert the ovf into a format that Fusion can try to boot. This will not enable a virtual machine with incompatable hardware to boot.

Fusion does have many of the features of VMware workstation but they are not all available in the GUI. An example of this is when you need a VM which only has a serial console. Make sure you have added the virtual serial hardware from the ‘other’ section in the settings. Next you need to edit the vmx file to add the correct settings: serial0.fileType = "pipe" serial0.fileName = "/tmp/serial1" Depending on how many serial devices you have the serial0 may change to serial1 etc.

When you su in ESX you may find that you can not run the usual commands. This may be down to environmental variables, use: su - This will change the environmental variables to the new user.