VMware makes some amazing things, sadly interoperability between them often seems to be an afterthought.

In my professional life we have been chasing after a longstanding issue with the bundled Tomcat server (vctomcat) included with vCenter. While its nice that VMware got around to including a JVM memory sizing option during the install we’ve found that even the “large” option doesn’t cut it for us. Along the way we’ve had a kb or two written about our troubles which begs the question of how do we monitor what is going on with Tomcat?
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Today at work I had the need to do some automation around several hundred HP Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) adapters and wanted to do a simple sanity check on the version & firmware of the device I was interacting with. HP makes this information available via HTTP without the need for authentication. Since I had trouble finding where this was documented here is the URL structure to use:

https://myilo-address/xmldata?item=All

This will return an XML document that contains the model, serial, and firmware revision. It works with iLO, iLO2, and iLO3 adapters.

Since I can never remember the setting here is how to specify a custom BIOS for use with a VMware Fusion / Workstation VM.

Add the following line to the .vmx file for the VM:

bios440.filename = "mycustombios.rom"

And place the rom file inside the VM folder.