vSphere Client 5.0 for Windows 8

I upgraded one of my computers to Windows 8 today. It seems the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant had falsely led me to believe that vSphere Client 5.0 was compatible with the new OS, when in fact it wasn’t.

Try as I might, I just couldn’t get it to install and compatibility mode was of no help either. I tried a few other things too but let’s cut the chase and get to the point here.

In my search for a solution I came across a blog post with direct links to a number of vSphere Client installation files. I can confirm the vSphere Client v5.0 Update 2 is compatible with Windows 8.

UPDATE: This is also works with Windows 8.1 RTM

UPDATE: This is also works on WIndows 10 1507, 1511 and 1607

Installing VMware vSphere 5.0 – Part 2

In this follow up to Part 1 I will take a look at configuring the network settings on the vSphere host.

Once you’re through with these instructions there’s no need to have it connected to a monitor or keyboard as you can use the VMware vSphere Client to administer the host remotely.

Turn on your host and wait for the hypervisor to load. How long this takes will depend on your hardware. (It takes a couple of minutes on my HP MicroServer N40L with only a dual core CPU.)

Press F2 on your keyboard to get to the configuration pages of the host

Type in the root password you created at the time of installing the hypervisor

Installing VMware vSphere 5.0 – Part 1

The instructions here are pretty straightforward so I’m going to keep it really simple.

Note: My first attempt was to use a Virtual Machine to boot off the ISO (without having to burn it to CD) but my installation hanged midway. I had to burn it to a CD in the end. Personally I installed my hypervisor on a USB drive using a different machine than my microserver since the server obviously doesn’t come with a CD drive.

Once you boot into the installation CD this is what the boot menu looks like.

Getting VM’s to Play Nice With Fog

I had an interesting experience trying to get virtual machines in VMWare Player to work with FOG – there was a trial and error process trying to get the VMs to PXE-boot into FOG and image the hard disk, etc.

This is a quick post just to note down some pointers to bear in mind when attempting the above:

• Use ‘bridged’ network type
• Use a static MAC address
• Change the disk type to IDE
• Allocate all disk space to begin with
• Update the fog kernel image (I used 2.2.4)

I’m coming up with a companion video to demonstrate the above on YouTube soon – It’s about time I dug out my screen capture software, Snagit, somewhere from my backups.

UPDATE: The video is now up on YouTube