This post VCP-DCV on vSphere 8.x Objective 4.19.3 – Configure Product Locker is a chapter, that is a part of a community study guide – VCP8-DCV Study Guide Page. The VMware Exam page is here on VMware’s website. The official code for this exam is 2V0-21. 23, and the cost of the exam is $250.00. There is a total of 70 questions with a duration of 130 minutes. The passing score is 300, max is 500.
NOTE: The exam based on vSphere 7.x will be retired the 31. Jan 2024 so you have still plenty of time to study and pass the exam based on vSphere 7.x. Check out our VCP7-DCV Study guide page here.
VMware ProductLocker is a central location for VMware tools. It is a VMware tools repository that all ESXi hosts can reach, which means that it is a shared datastore.
What is a VMware Tools version-mapping file?
This is what's called by VMware a VMware version-mapping file that details the version of VMware Tools released and which release of VMware ESXi is mapped into that version of VMware tools. it looks like this:
https://packages.vmware.com/tools/versions
Quote:
This file provides a one-to-one mapping between VMware Tools for # ESX/ESXi version-number codes, and paths to OSP repositories suitable # for that Tools version. # # The ESXi server mapping is only to show that the particular version of # Tools ships with that particular ESXi server build number, but the Tools # can work with a greater range of ESXi versions.
Get the latest version of VMware Tools and put it into a shared location (ProductLocker)
Go to this location to get the latest version of VMware tools and login with your VMware account (if you don't have one, you can create one for free).
https://www.vmware.com/go/tools
Now create a central repository on your shared datastore. This datastore is accessible from all the hosts within your cluster. The process is fairly simple. Here are the steps:
Create a folder, we name it “vmwaretools” and we create it on a shared datastore provided by StarWind. What we need to do next is to extract the latest VMware Tools into the directory we have just created. Simple, right?
FYI, We have downloaded the latest VMware Tools packages for Windows version 12.1.5.
Next, we need to change the location for ESXi VMware Tools Update. We can do that via ESXi host client for example (note that there are other ways to do it as well, ex. via CLI, via MOB (managed object browser) or others.
Fire up your ESXi host client and go to the Advanced System Settings. The user variable that you want to update is the UserVars.ProductLockerLocation variable. Just change it to you shared datastore path….
UserVars.ProductLockerLocation
The defaults are:
/locker/packages/vmtoolsRepo
Find the current ProductLocker location:
From ESXi shell:
ls -l /productLocker
readlink /productLocker
Next, we need to delete the Symlink location for ProductLocker. We need to change the ProductLocker location to the centralized repo by updating SymLink (in fact, we need to delete the SymLink and recreate it).
You could simply just reboot your ESXi hosts instead, but we can avoid you to do so via this:
rm productLocker
ln -s /vmfs/volumes/StarWind/vmwaretools /productLocker
Well, this is it my friends.
Check the VMware KB2129825 for further details.
Hopefully this chapter will help you to study towards VMware VCP-DCV Certification based on vSphere 8.x. Find other chapters on the main page of the guide – VCP8-DCV Study Guide Page.
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