Damian Murdoch comes through again, this time, helping us change the IP address of the service console in VMware's ESX Server 3.x.

If you want to change the IP address of the service console in ESX 3.x you can using a command in the service console.

To change the IP address of the ESX 3.x host, you need to change the configuration of the vswif. By default this is vswif0 and this is assumed in this document. Login to the service console with root permissions, either by using root or doing a su - to get the permissions.

Once in the service console runt the command "esxcfg-vswif -d vswif0". This command deletes the existing vswif0. Don't worry if you get a message about nothing to flush. Then you need to run the command to change the ip address, subnet mask and broadcast address. They are also specified in that order when the command is given. An example command is below.

"esxcfg-vswif -a vswif0 -p Service\ Console -i 10.1.1.1 -n 255.255.255.0 -b 10.1.1.255"

In this command the -a switch is to add a vswif, the \ in the Service\ Console is deliberate, the -i is the ip address, the -n is the netmask and the -b is the broadcast address.

You now need to change your default gateway, you can do this by editing the network file located at /etc/sysconfig/network. To do this at the command prompt, follow the steps below.

Check out the rest of this great tip on Damian's Web site, here.