We switched to testing how TotalView could manage VMware's ESX machines. TotalView can manage VMware ESX-based VM whether or not VMware's VirtualCenter application is present. After successfully adding an ESX host to the management system, we attempted to create a new VM on that host using the TotalView interface using all methods available to us.

There were two ways to install a VM using TotalView, one was a 'typical' install that uses default settings after selecting the operating type, and the other was a 'custom' install in which we could choose more detailed options. We were able to successfully create a VM (SLES 10.2) using 'typical' with Local Storage and it refreshed correctly with TotalView. But while we were editing or changing properties, we noticed that TotalView doesn't refresh very well. It really should refresh more often because it's not very useful to monitor VMs if you have to manually refresh the display all the time.

When we tried installing from a shared DVD ISO image, we had to copy it to our TotalView machine. We couldn't install VMware Tools for SLES (the driver tools that connect the hypervisor and the guest operating system together) as we got a general system error.

We next tried a custom VMware client install using NFS storage for Windows 2008 server. After creating a 'custom'-based VM, TotalView crashed and then would not restart, the database was corrupted. We had to re-install again because it gave the same error every time we started up.

Our final creation test (creation) worked OK, with no crashing after refreshing. We installed Windows 2008 Server on this VM. TotalView indicated the creation was successful, but the new VM wouldn't show up in the TotalView GUI. When we refreshed the view, TotalView indicated that an "Unhandled exception occurred in your application" but we could hit the continue button and ignore the error. These errors seemed to happen all too frequently.