VMWare View: add an existing VM

I’m in the process of trying to get rid of any thick clients that I currently work on to convert solely to Virtual Machines, and clear out my desk space.
Well, I thought the best way to do this was to move my Precision 690 to the lab, install ESXi on it, and have a my VM on there.

As I tried to add the VM that resides on this ESXi server (which is not part of vCenter), I could not add it as an individual desktop.  I then remembered that I needed to have the View agent installed for this to work. After installing the View Agent, I was hopeful, but alas, the VM still didn’t show up. On Step 3 of adding the machine, it would supposedly give a list of available VMs to add and a find option, but nothing could be found.

This is where I ended up finding an undocumented feature of the VMWare View Agent that allows a VM that does not reside within a vCenter server to be added as a View VM.

Here are the steps to get that part working:

If you’re adding the VM as “other” you need to identify it to the system that this isn’t a vCenter managed VM eventhough it is running on ESX (technically supposed to have vCenter for VMs on ESX):

1. Remove the agent

2. Put the installer of the agent locally and go to the command line. Type in the following:

<agent-installer>.exe /V”VDM_VC_MANAGED_Agent=0″.

3. When it goes through the install, it should ask for the connection server. Put that IP/FQDN in.

4. Re-start the process of Adding the Individual source.

NOTE!! ***There is no space between the /V switch and the argument VDM_VC_MANAGED_AGENT=0***

Hope this will help someone