Question

I want to set the VM’s hostname (it is a debian squeeze system with open-vm-tools installed) automatically to the VM’s name which I set and see in the vSphere Client..

I tried

    ~# vmtoolsd --cmd "info-get guestinfo.name" 2> /etc/hostname

but the command returns “No value found”

Answer 1

Found this on another site. Seems that you have to set the values before you can query them.

There may be situations where you want to determine the vCenter display name for a VM from within the OS of the VM.

This could be useful if cloning multiple virtual desktops from a syspreped template to enable the option to set the machine name to be the same as the vCenter display name. It could also be useful in many other scenarios.

However, by default there is no way to do this using the standard VM tools that are installed into the virtual machine.

It is possible though to set a custom attribute on the VM object in vCenter and then query this from within the the OS of the virtual machine.

The following script can be run using the vSphere PowerCLI to set a custom attribute to be the same as the vCenter display name:

$vServer= “vCenter.server.fqdn”
$vmName = “VM display name”

If (-not (Get-PSSnapin VMware.VimAutomation.Core -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue)) {
Add-PSSnapin VMware.VimAutomation.Core
}

Connect-VIServer $vServer | out-null

$vmSet = GET-VM $vmName | Get-View
$vmConfigSpec = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineConfigSpec
$gInfo = New-Object VMware.Vim.optionvalue
$ginfo.Key=”guestinfo.hostname”
$gInfo.Value=$vmSet.Name
$vmConfigSpec.extraconfig += $gInfo
$vmSet.ReconfigVM($vmConfigSpec)

Disconnect-VIServer $vServer -Confirm:$false | out-null

Once this is set, it is possible to query it within the VM, using the VM tools and the following command:

vmtoolsd.exe –cmd “info-get guestinfo.hostname”

This can of course, be added to scripts to set this attribute against multiple machines.

Credit goes to Richard Parmiter!