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"Need have have" - revisited

2 min read #Management #vSphere #Whitebox #Administration

If you remember about 6 months ago I wrote an article about the fact that hot add of any kind of virtual hardware in the free free version of ESXi. I thought I would revisit the problems I had now that Update 1 was released last week.

The host has been upgraded to ESX4i Update 1

Text fragment showing VMware ESXi version 4.0.0 build 208167

I took a Windows 2008 Guest OS.

VM Options tab with blue boxes highlighting Enable memory hot add selected and CPU hot plug disabled

Firstly, I noticed - CPU Hot plug was not available. Regarding memory Hot Add - I did have the option to turn on / off.

I powered on the machine. And started my journey again to add a new hard disk to the VM while it was powered on.

VM settings Hardware tab with 2048 MB memory selected and memory configuration slider, VM version 7

Windows Disk Management showing a single 35 GB NTFS C: drive on Disk 0 marked healthy and primary partition

Edit Settings -> Add -> yada yada yada….. (you know the drill…)

I did not receive any errors

Virtual Machine Properties Hardware tab adding a new SCSI controller (LSI Logic SAS) and a new virtual hard disk

And Lo and Behold:

Windows Disk Management showing C: 35 GB NTFS healthy and Disk 1 200 MB uninitialized unallocated

Tried the same with a second NIC

VM hardware settings adding a New NIC on VM Network with E1000 adapter type and network label options

And Lo and Behold:

Windows taskbar popup reading Installing device driver software, click here for status

Last thing I tried - (you remember the memory/CPU hot-add from before.

This is not a feature that is offered with the free version of ESXi - but what the heck - the option was there, so I figured I would try it.

Windows System panel: Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 2.33GHz, 2GB RAM, 32-bit OS, VMware Virtualized badge

VMware VM Hardware tab showing Memory edited to 3072 MB with max hot-add memory of 32 GB note

And I got shot down - as expected:

Error dialog: insufficient licenses to complete operation, feature hotplug not licensed with this edition

The questions I asked my previous article were:

  1. The error message of course is not very well phrased - and I would love to know what “need have have” is?
  2. Why in heaven’s name would you take away the most basic functionality that has been in every single VMware product (besides Player) for the past 5 years? VMware? Please tell me that was a mistake?

So as you can see, the first has been fixed, and William Shakespeare will no longer be turning over in his grave.

Regarding the second one, I guess VMware realized the mistake, and have remedied the situation that arose with ESX4i. Thank you for correcting the problem

And of course - the removal of the above mentioned hardware (HD and NIC) works on a live machine as well.

Hope you enjoyed the ride!