Posted by jpluimers on 2013/01/07
Experimenting with ESXi5, I accidentally got a GPT formatted USB stick that no XP systems could handle.
I used Convert GPT Disk to MBR Disk – Windows 7 Forums to convert it back to MBR.
I needed to perform these DiskPart steps on a Windows 7 machine, as
–jeroen
Posted in ESXi5, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi, Windows, Windows 7, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/12/10
Every once in a while I need some disk imaging software. After all these years, WinImage is still my tool of choice.
This time, I needed it to create a Creating vSphere 5 ESXi embedded USB Stick.
Usually I only need it for a day or two, and most of the times I have reinstalled my system between uses. Not this time, so I needed to enter the license, which I knew I had, but had to search for it.
Luckily, I have installed the Lookout search tool for Outlook (which – even though you cannot officially get it any more – is so much better than the integrated search).
It found back the below message, from 1997.
1997! And the license is indeed perpetual: it still works on the most current WinImage build (which now supports x64 as well as x86, a lot more disk image formats and disk types, etc).
The WinImage site references some very old tools back from the days when you had BBS, Fidonet, ARPANET, Simtel, and Compuserve (the latter both hosted on PDP-10 machines, 1970s based technologies still ruled many of the computing world).
But I digress.
Back then, the only disk image supported were floppy disks, and most tools were DOS based. Like the FDFormat tool from Christoph H. Hochstätter which allowed you to add 300 kilobyte of extra space on 3.5 inch 1.44 megabyte floppy disk.
You can still see that in the WinImage binaries: Bootsector from C.H. Hochstatter
The email:
From: Gilles Vollant [mailto:——@winimage.com]
Sent: 07 December 1997 13:02
To: ‘——@xs4all.nl’
Subject: WinImage registration notificationThank you a lot for registering WinImage 4.00 Professional
Your code of registration is:
J——s
—————Note there is now french, english, italian, portugese, spanish and german version of WinImage.
I send you a floppy with WinImage 4.00 and my freeware Extract. I hope you’ll be happy with WinImage !Don ‘t hesitate to upload it on BBS and give to your friend !
Only two question : Where did you find WinImage and do you Windows 3.1, Win
95 or WinNT version, or both ? (you can answer in french or english)For getting more information, you can connect on my web site at :
http://www.winimage.com/winimage.htm
and at http://www.winimage.com for information and downloading other tools (including related to WinImage)Regards,
Gilles Vollant
–jeroen
via:
Posted in BBS, FidoNet, History, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/10/01
It is possible from inside a guest VM to determine the kind of VMware host it runs on by looking at the BIOS information and for instance map the version of VMware Tools to install.
Still need to find out about the 04/15/11 BIOS Release Date, but this should give me a start (vSphere matches ESX/ESXi):
VMware version BIOS Release Date Address (hex) (bytes) ESX 2.5 04/21/2004 0xE8480 97152 ESX 3.0 04/17/2006 0xE7C70 99216 ESX 3.5 01/30/2008 0xE7910 100080 ESX 4 08/15/2008 0xEA6C0 88384 ESX 4U1 09/22/2009 0xEA550 88752 ESX 4.1 10/13/2009 0xEA2E0 89376 ESX 5 01/07/2011 0xE72C0 101696 ESX 5.1 22/06/2012 0xEA0C0 89920
–jeroen
Via:
Posted in BIOS, Boot, ESXi4, ESXi5, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/08/23
This morning, when starting VMware Workstation 8.0.4, it indicated that 9.0.0 was available.
No news on the VMware website (it still shows adverts for Workstation 8), nor on Wikipedia VMware Workstation page so is their auto-update system in an identity crisis or what?
Two links on VMware Workstation 9.0.0 Build 812388, but not sure if nsane is a good source of information. On the other hand, there is also news on the Bulgarian Kaldata about VMware Player 5.0.0 Build 812388.
Since VMware Player and Workstation share build numbers, and there has been a VMware Workstation Technology Preview 2012 for about 6 months, something could be in the midst of release in time zones where it is not yet 20120823.
VMware workstation checks https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds and https://ueip.vmware.com/, but I didn’t decrypt the traffic there yet.
Anyone with the latest official news on this?
Edit 20120823 0631UTC:
Two links I just found:
So yes, there was a temporary 2b || !2b crisis in the update service.
Edit 20120823 0711UTC:
Now it is 20120823 in California too, so now the VMware Workstation pages and VMware Workstation What”s new pages got updated and shows that VMware Workstation 9 is out.
This is the quote from the dialog on the right: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Power User, VMware, VMware Workstation | 1 Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/07/30
Installing and booting ESXi 5 from USB allows you to keep your storage exclusively for VMs and separately make backup of your boot configuration and data configuration (note you cannot put the DataStore on your USB stick).
A small stick (minimum 1 gigabyte) will suffice, and works on many systems, but at first not on my HP XW6600, despite the latest BIOS version 1.36a. You get a nice “Non-System disk or disk error” message.
Both methods I tried failed at first. I thought they failed because the BIOS on the HP has limited USB boot support. It did boot from single partition USB sticks, but seemed not to boot from multi-partition ones, no matter if they are removable or HDD (with the removable bit flipped).
The ESXi5 installer is a single partition one. The final ESXi5 installed image is a multi-partition one. That’s what got me thinking into the multi-partiton direction.
Since the problem is similar to the impossibility of booting VMware workstation VMs from USB stick, (this fails even from the BIOS), I tried Plop since Plop works for VMware Workstation. The Plop USB boot manager failed too. My final thought was to install Plop on a FAT formatted USB stick(which does boot) and continue from there to the ESXi5 one: that failed too.
Boy I was wrong: the failure was not caused by the multi-partition setup, but because of my “Google blindness”: I searched in the wrong direction with the wrong keywords, therefore not getting the right links as search results.
A VMware Communities forum threads on “No bootable device” after successful ESXI5 installation on Intel DG35EC desktop motherboard” and No boot after clean install finally got me in the right direction:
As of ESXi5, the default partition table type is GPT (GUID Partition Table), not MBR (Master Boot Record) any more (thats why an ESXi4 install will work fine).
Booting from GPT is in the EFI standards (now in its second generation UEFI or United Extensible Firmware), allowing – among others – to boot from disks bigger than 2 terrabyte. You need a BIOS that is compatible with GPT to do so, and the HP XW6600 BIOS clearly isn’t compatible with GPT.
Not all is lost, as while installing ESXi5, you have an option – though well hidden – to force it to use MBR boot. That worked, and I will blog on the steps later.
The good news: it now works on my HP XW6600 workstations (that support both VT-x and VT-d, which means I can do PCI pass through).
First things first though: creating the USB stick in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in BIOS, Boot, ESXi4, ESXi5, Hardware, HP XW6600, Power User, UEFI, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | 4 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/07/06
Almost 2 years back, I wrote that ESXi 4.1 supports USB pass through:
Recently I needed serial pass through as well, and surprise surprise, serial port pass through too was introduced with ESXi 4.1 as Vlatan Seget posted about a year ago:
in ESXi 4.1 since with this release of VMware Hypervizor now you have the possibility to attach and use the Serial port of the physical host.
Even better: it still works in ESXi 5 (:
–jeroen
via: Serial Port handling in ESXi 4.1 | ESX Virtualization.
Posted in Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/07/02
If you:
Then check if the “VMware DHCP Service” and “VMware NAT Service” are running using this command:
rem "VMware DHCP Service"
sc queryex VMnetDHCP
sc queryex "VMware NAT Service"
If either of them has’t started, use these command – as an Administrator – to start them (they won’t start a service that is already started):
rem "VMware DHCP Service"
net start VMnetDHCP
net start "VMware NAT Service"
Note that VMware will not complain if the VMware DHCP Service or VMware NAT Service have not started (not even in the eventlog) and will just start your VM fine.
If your VMware DHCP service is not running, and you un-suspend a VM that had an address assigned through DHCP, you usually get errors like this:
C:\Users\j.pluimers>tracert -d 194.109.6.66
Tracing route to 194.109.6.66 over a maximum of 30 hops
1 Transmit error: code 1231.
Trace complete.
For my memory:
There are a few more interesting batch files at How to Start & Stop VMware server/Workstation manually | Windows Reference.
–jeroen
via: How to Start & Stop VMware server/Workstation manually | Windows Reference.
Posted in Power User, VMware | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/03/01
Sometimes you have a DUH moment.
I just had was one: I upgraded VMware Workstation to 8.0.2 a couple of days ago.
Today one the less frequently used development virtual machines would not see the SQL Server 2000 alias it could find before.
Reasons:
I blogged about the SQL Server 2000 alias last week, but in fact the work had been more than 2 months ago, so it took me a while to add up reasons 1 and 2 and find out the answer was in fact 3:
Reset the VMware vmnet1 and vmnet8 to the subnets they were before, and everything works fine and all is dandy again.
–jeroen
Posted in Power User, VMware | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/02/24
Somehow, I have the impression that not all VMware View Client network admins fully read and understand the “PCoIP Protocol Virtual Desktop Network Design Checklist”
That checklist is important, as it is easy to get things wrong and dissatisfy your users without reason (heck, they get worse than mediocre RDP performance experience, so you could’ve saved you the work of PCoIP in the first place).
So please do read the “PCoIP Protocol Virtual Desktop Network Design Checklist“.
It starts with
The PCoIP protocol provides a real-time delivery of a rich user desktop experience in virtual desktop and remote workstation environments.
To ensure a responsive desktop, the PCoIP protocol must be deployed across a properly architected virtual desktop network infrastructure that meets bandwidth, QoS, latency, jitter, and packet loss requirements.
CheckPoint VPN sometimes can be a dork combined with PCoIP. and at least make sure UDP works well over your VPN.
–jeroen
via: “PCoIP Protocol Virtual Desktop Network Design Checklist”
(Some more backgorund reading and even more)
(fixed typo: one of the PCoIP occurances was PCiOP, luckily, Google knows better :)
Posted in Power User, View, VMware | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/02/09
Lets start post 800 by mentioning it took quite a bit of time to solve the connection problem to VDI. I hope it will help others, and if I ever run into this again myself: now I know where to look :)
Some clients make heavy use of VMware VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) which moves the desktop into the VMs in the data center.
A while ago I spent most of the day tracking down a “Connect Desktop Failed” error with VMware View Client running on a Windows 7 x64 workstation to connect to a VDI VM. It would connect to the VDI server, authenticate, start the Desktop, but could not connect to the Desktop.
The amazing thing is that the VMware view client worked fine on an XP VM workstation (with and without SNX) XP physical machine with SNX, and another Windows 7 x64 VM workstation (also with and without SNX) and Windows 7 x64 physical machine with SNX.
Clearly something was wrong with this particular Windows 7 x64 workstation that is host of most of my development VMs so I didn’t want to do a re-install.
I tried many obvious things on the Windows 7 x64 workstation:
Since the “Connect desktop failed” does not return many English search results, I started browsing the Russian ones. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Power User, View, VMware | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 