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Is there any way to create folders for my VMs on ESXi Hypervisor 5.1? I can create folders for my VMs on my licensed ESXi hosts with vCenter. The closest I can get on ESXi Hypervisor is to create Resource Pools for them, but that's obviously not the correct methodology and I don't want to do it.

Is this another limitation of ESXi Hypervisor?

Josh
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    AFAIK there isn't a way to do this without vCenter, and you're right, creating Resource Pools to visually/organizationally organize VM's is the wrong way to do it. – joeqwerty Oct 29 '13 at 18:34
  • If you do not have money you could consider migrating to Cloudstack/KVM which is free. – jirib Oct 29 '13 at 19:29

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There is no way to organize them into folders. If you get creative with the naming scheme you can get away with it, though. ESXi allows VMs to have special characters in their names, so you could prefix the name with a tag (like... (WEB) for web servers, or something) so it'll appear in a certain spot on the list.

vCenter is definitely the way to go if you have enough VMs to need organizing.

Nathan C
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    Exactly. You shouldn't have so many VMs in a single ESXi install that you need folder organization... And if you do, the $500 tier of vSphere Essentials will *buy* you the ability to do so. – ewwhite Oct 29 '13 at 18:47
  • Thank you for the response. This is just a lab environment and I was looking for a way to group VMs so a few users could have their own sandbox without access to another's VMs. I guess it's a no go. – Josh Oct 29 '13 at 18:49
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    If you're looking to restrict certain VM's to certain users then create the users and grant them the appropriate permissions on the VM's. – joeqwerty Oct 29 '13 at 19:11