If you’ve tried to install the vSphere client on Windows 7, you’ve undoubtedly come across errors like the following:

Error parsing the server "192.168.2.2" "clients.xml" file.
Login will continue, contact your system administrator.

and

The type initializer for 'VirtualInfrastructure.Utils.HttpWebRequestProxy' threw an exception.

Although Windows 7 is fully released now, nobody seems to feel like supporting it. Though, I guess Microsoft did kindof rush it out the door… Anyway, there’s a nice PowerShell script out there that allows you to fix this stupidity. After browsing the VMWare community, I came across this URL:

http://www.tinyint.com/index.php/2009/09/04/vsphere-client-on-windows-7/

I followed the instructions and now everything is working the way it should be. Maybe VMWare could just… do this for you ?

It turns out that in order to enable VMotion, every system on the network has to be able to ping the aforementioned isolation address, which defaults to .1 of their subnet. Well, I’ll be. If somebody had mentioned this to me, I wouldn’t be in such a pickle! Since I was setting this up in a management vlan like a good admin, I didn’t have a .1!

After nearly 2 hours of being on hold (no, I’m not joking…), I got a tech to let me in on a little tip! He told me to go to my options, and in advanced settings, I could set das.isolationaddress to whatever I wanted! Wooo!

Oh, wait. VMotion also requires that every host can resolve every other host using an FQDN, and therefore DNS. Kindof quirky to me, as that seems to almost necessitate a secondary DNS server, and you’re not even out of your management vlan yet.