It's a great pleasure to see this year the VMworld event will be absolutely online. So be hurry up and don't miss it, if you would like to participate in this wonderful event on Sep 29 until Oct 1. You can register it here ... (It's free). For more information about the VMworld 2020, please check the FAQ.
All of you maybe see a file name like ".sdd.sf " in the ESXi root directory of each VMFS volume especially when you connect via SSH, and also you couldn't edit/delete it. But what's that file and what's the usage of this one exactly ?!
Based on information in the KB1001618 they are some system files that are resided in the root of any VMFS volumes as hidden files (start with a dot). So the abbreviation for the .sdd.sf file is:
.sdd = SCSI device description / .sf = system file
To know about the other types of file:
It's good to know about the announcing VMware Horizon 8 GA with a focus on improving many today's critical business in the VDI infra, especially industrial, educational, and healthcare. Thanks to Sachin Sharma you can read more about the Horizon 8 2006 look at the following link:
Horizon 8: Unleashing the Power of Secure Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Deployments with a Modern Platform
Also you can check the build numbers of all Horizon (View) versions in the KB2143853
Sometimes we have circumstances that cannot manage the ESXi host directly via local accounts, like forgetting root credentials. So there once again another perfect benefit of using vSphere Host Profile feature in a situation like when we lose the ESXi root. Now consider we don't have access to the host for any reason like that I describe or even unintentionally changing the root permission to read-only access privilege. So what should we do?!
Inside the vSphere environment (Web Client) go to the Policies and Profiles section and create a new host profile or generate it from an specific ESXi host. If you edit this profile object, inside the Security Configuration section you can create new fields about the Administrator password and its permission rule like the following screenshots:
I saw many times people ask and speak about what is really the operation system of VMware ESXi?! Generally many of them called it as a Linux OS (customized by VMware). Many factors cause to conclusion this result like the following list:
But technically I should say VMware ESXi is NOT a Linux OS!
First of all, we should review the Linux definition again carefully: Linux is an open-source Unix-based OS that is developed by Linus Torvalds (1991) that has many popular distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian (free distributions) and some other commercial/supported distribution such as SUSE and RedHat, and all of them have an important common characteristic: All of them are based on the Linux Kernel that ESXi doesn't have it at all, because as you know the VMware developed its own special OS kernel: VMkernel (VMM) the primary part in the ESXi architecture.
But really all of those mentioned OS characteristics are exist inside VMware ESXi too, but not because you may think ESXi is a Linux system. All of them are possible because the ESXi consists of a BusyBox: a lightweight unix-like shell includes of many of Unix applications/utilities inside a software suite and some other management CLIs and Unix-like tools provided by the VMware.
However because the ESXi does not provide all aspects of the Unix-OS functionalities, we cannot say it's a Unix OS too. I emphasis we speak about the ESXi product, not its precedence the traditional ESX! because the ESX used RHEL in many functionalities, like the installation wizard.
