Accept VMware vCenter Server Appliance EULA from command line

During the vCenter Server appliance deployment I accidentally skipped the license acceptance page. Unfortunately the page didn't appear ever again...:)

To deal with it I found a way to accept EULA directly from the appliances shell console:

• Login to the vCenter server appliance shell console (default credentials: root/vmware)
• Navigate to the /etc/vmware-vpx folder: cd /etc/vmware-vpx
• Create empty file eula.accepted with: vi eula.accepted and save it: :wq

You can now start vCenter Service from the console with:

• service vmware-vpxd start
• service vmware-vpxd status

Hope it helps...:)

Reclaim space from Thin Provisioned volumes

Today a tool to reclaim space from thin provisioned volumes was presented at the VMware Labs web page:

http://labs.vmware.com/flings/guest-reclaim

Unfortunately, before you will try it, you have to consider that there are still couple of "gotcha's":

• Currently supports only RDM devices 
• Doesn't work with NFS volumes 
• Works only for NTFS filesystem

Here is a quotation from the official docs from point 6:

"The tool transparently operates on virtual disk if the hypervisor emulation layer reports virtual disks as thin provisioned. End to End reporting of thin provisioning status in a virtual storage stack is required to fully leverage Thin Provisioning in a virtualized environment.

This tool is not related to any VMWare ESX or any other Hypervisor Release. If ever ESX supports
unmaps on virtual disk in the future, it will be tied to “Virtual Hardware Version Upgrade” and will
mostly be in a release after vSphere 5.0.
For the authoritative word on ESX virtual disk unmap support, please check official updates about
features in VSphere 5.x releases.
Until then you can use tools on RDMs."


Anyway, we have good prospects for the future, as the authors already announced that they will continue to develop this tool in the future and if you have environment with Raw Devices this is something you should keep an eye on.