Missing Advanced settings in VM's

[Todd Bertschi]

I posted this question in the Virtualization community but this community seems more active. Apologies for the mudding of PowerCLI content but technically I'm using PowerCLI to change settings. Does that give it a pass?

I'm doing some mass changes on an inherited system that has been upgraded from 5.x to the latest. I just stepped in and it's a mess. My issue is that doing queries on VM's, there are some of the Advanced-Settings that are missing from some of the VM's but not all. Things like isolation.tools.copy.disable are not on about half my VM's. I've found about 17 different settings that some are on and some aren't but I can't find a consistency between them. I would've thought Hardware Compatibility would be it but older 5.5 ones have it but newer 6.0 ones don't. Everything I've been reading say it's okay to just add them, but this is a prod system (I have no real test system). Basically, I'm looking for either a reason why some have the settings and some don't or a sanity check that it's probably okay to just add them. 

Any comments are appreciated.

Peace

[LucD]

In my experience, it should be ok to add them, although the normal procedure would be to first check on a test system.

The difference between 5.5 and 6.0 VMs could be that they just forgot this setting.
It is in any case advised to disable that, and others, option.
See Disable Copy and Paste Operations Between Guest Operating System and Remote Console (vmware.com)

[Todd Bertschi]

Thank you LucD. This option is just one option out of a bunch that seem missing. I'm running compliance checks against everything. I have the scripts down for the hosts and VCSA. The VM's are an absolute mess. I can target specific VM's so I can sort of test the settings. I got word this morning that I might finally be getting some old hardware that I can turn into a test environment. They seem to have listened to me that it's better to buy new hardware and do a fresh vCenter 8 install than upgrade this old POS environment. 

Thank you again for the sanity check.