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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘VMware’ Category

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VMware KB: Sharing a folder from your Mac to a virtual machine

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/12/23

Note that Sharing a Mac folder through VMware Fusion to a Windows VM works, but is:

  1. not fast
  2. eats a lot of Mac resources
    (it would get the fan of my MacBook Air running like mad when copying about 1Gigabyte of files – about 20-thousand files total; a robocopy /mir sync when nothing is changes takes a whopping 5 minutes)

This is how you do it:

To configure a shared folder in a Windows virtual machine:

  1. Launch VMware Fusion.
  2. Power on the virtual machine.
  3. Click Virtual Machine > Settings.
  4. Click Sharing.
  5. Select Share folders on your Mac.
  6. Click the + button.
  7. Browse to the folder on the Mac that will be shared with the virtual machine and click Add.

Shared folders can be accessed via the VMware Shared Folders shortcut on the Windows desktop or the mapped network drive Z:.

–jeroen

via VMware KB: Sharing a folder from your Mac to a virtual machine.

Posted in Fusion, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, MacBook, Power User, VMware, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

VMware fusion on MacBook Air with OS X Lion seems to hang when getting back from sleep – Super User

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/11/14

If you have reactions on the question below, please add them to the SuperUser.com thread when possible.

Every once in a while, my MacBook Air becomes unresponsive when it is sleeping and I open the lid.

It seems to only happen in these circumstances:

  • the MacBook air got into sleep modus because of closing the lid
  • VMware Fusion 4 (4.0.2 build 491587) is running full screen
  • The guest OS has a blank screen screen saver

When opening the lid, the backlight goes on, but the MacBook Air does not react on any key-combinations I tried.

I tried these, but to no avail:

  • press the Touchpad
  • press Control + Command
  • press Control + Command + Enter
  • press Command + Tab

The only thing that works is to press the Power button for 5+ seconds (forcing a hard power off) then reboot.

Two questions:

  • For anyone having seen similar bahviour: what circumstances did you have?
  • Any solution to this apart from first suspending the guest VM?

–jeroen

via: VMware fusion on MacBook Air with OS X Lion seems to hang when getting back from sleep – Super User.

Posted in Apple, Fusion, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, MacBook, MacBook-Air, Power User, VMware | 2 Comments »

Running OS X Lion 10.7 on VMware Workstation 7.1.4 and 8.0 (via: How to Install Retail OS X 10.6 under VMware Workstation or Player – InsanelyMac Forum)

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/10/14

This might not be strictly legal, but it is supposed to be possible to run the retail OS X Lion 10.7 under VMware Workstation 8 (or VMware Fusion 4) and VMware Workstation 7.1.4 (or VMware Player 3.1.4) on a regular PC (if that PC Supports VT) running Windows 7 x64.

Since Apple MacBook still don’t come with a TrackPoint (and having suffered from RSI, that is about the only pointing device I can use) there are only two options for me:

  1. Go the route described above
  2. Use an external USB TrackPoint keyboard with a Mac
    (traveling with a huge external USB keyboard, I’d look like my long time friend Mark Miller from DevExpress, who also suffered from RSI)
    (boy I wish there was a wireless ThinkPad TrackPoint keyboard)

–jeroen

Via: How to Install Retail OS X 10.6 under VMware Workstation or Player – InsanelyMac Forum and 
How to Install Retail OS X 10.6 “Snow” and OS X 10.7 “Lion” under VMware Workstation 8 and Fusion 4, A simple set of instructions – InsanelyMac Forum

Posted in Apple, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, Power User, RSI, UltraNav keyboards, VMware, Windows, Windows 7 | 1 Comment »

Mouse cursor sometimes invisible when running an XP guest in VMware Workstation/Player: Invisible Mouse Cursor on Text Editors « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of Wiert stuff

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/09/30

The  RDP to VMware host running an XP guest: Invisible Mouse Cursor on Text Editors problem is not limited to RDP-ing into the VMware host, but also happens on some hosts themselves (including my ThinkPad W701 running Windows 7 x64).

This  VMware Communities: Invisible Mouse Cursor on Text Editors … thread (that has a different host configuration: Vista) comes up with 2 different solutions that both work:

  • Make your Windows XP mouse scheme the “Windows Black (system scheme)”
  • Put the Windowx XP video hardware acceleration one position below maximum.

Since less hardware acceleration also means far less performance, I’ve opted for the first solution.

–jeroen

via RDP to VMware host running an XP guest: Invisible Mouse Cursor on Text Editors « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of Wiert stuff.

Posted in Power User, VMware | Leave a Comment »

Download VMware Fusion 4

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/09/16

Right after finding out VMware Fusion 4 got released, I downloaded and installed it.

Basically, there are two VMware Fusion 4.0.1 downloads:

I can’t imagine McAfee being larger than the size of VMware, and if it has the same speed impact on a Mac as it has on PCs, then don’t get it: get the light version.

–jeroen

Via: Download VMware Fusion 4.

Posted in Apple, Fusion, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, Power User, VMware | Leave a Comment »

Coincidence? MacBook Air arrived, Windows 8 preview and VMware Fusion 4 got released

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/09/15

My MacBook Air has arrived, a few days before VMware Fusion 4 got out and a very early preview of Windows 8 got released.

Time to move my iOS dev env from my Mac Mini Server dev env over to this fully loaded 13.3 inch MacBook Air model  (A1369 with 1.8GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7 / 4GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM / 256GB Flash Storage).

A few initial observations on the MacBook Air:

Oh well, will install it at the Embarcadero office later this week.

A few things on VMware Fusion 4:

Time to have a lot of fun :)

–jeroen

Via: VMware: VMware Support Insider: Fusion 4 is here!.

http://www.everymac.com/ultimate-mac-lookup/?search_keywords=A1369

Posted in About, Apple, LifeHacker, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, Personal, Power User, VMware | 1 Comment »

Synchronize your NTP time using pool.ntp.org: the internet cluster of ntp servers

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/07/15

If you use NTP for syncing your time, then choose pool.ntp.org as your time server:

The pool.ntp.org project is a big virtual cluster of timeservers providing reliable easy to use NTP service for millions of clients.

I use it for instance to synchronize the time on my ESXi servers.

Note: when you run Windows VMs as ESXi guests; let ESXi time-sync them through the VMware tools, and disable Windows’ own time syncing. I didn’t disable it, and my Windows VMs were consistently off by over 30 minutes.

–jeroen

via pool.ntp.org: the internet cluster of ntp servers.

Posted in *nix, ESXi4, Power User, VMware, Windows, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP | 4 Comments »

Resize your VMware ESXi/ESX/vSphere disks (via JJClements.co.uk)

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/06/13

James Clements explains how to resize your VMware ESXi/ESX/vSphere disks.

You can resize the disks live when using ESXi/ESX/vShere 4 and up.

When using Windows Vista or 2008 and up, you don’t need special tools for resizing the partitions on those disks: the built-in disk manager can do it.

When using Windows 2003 Server, Windows XP or less, then you need the EXTPART tool from Dell as explained by GeekSeat:

All you need to do now is provision the extra space to the VM, then run the tool at the command line and follow the wizard:

C:\>extpart.exe
ExtPart - Utility to extend basic disks (Build 1.0.4)
(c) Dell Computer Corporation 2003
.
Volume to extend (drive letter or mount point): c:
Current volume size : 66285 MB (69504860160 bytes)
Current partition size : 76285 MB (79990815744 bytes)
Size to expand the volume (MB): 76285

that’s it – job done . . zero downtime (watch out of course . . this works differently if you have a clustered disk to extend – see: http://geekseat.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/replacing-clustered-storage-for-a-sql-cluster-emc-ce-ms-clustering/ )

Note the “Size to expand” is actually the number of MB you are adding to the volume as Redelijkheid explains.

Sometimes you need to do this in multiple steps as diskmgmt.msc does not always give the free partition space in megabytes.

There is no need to reboot after expanding using ExtPart.

Edit: 20111222; you can download ExtPart through the DELL web-site; there are also direct http downloads of the EXE and README, and direct ftp downloads for the EXE and README.

If you don’t trust ExtPart, there is always the GParted way as explained by BleepingComputer.com.

–jeroen

via: 

Posted in ESXi4, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi | 2 Comments »

Removing the VMWare Server SSL Certificate Trust Warning – via: IIS Hacks | Server and System Administration

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/05/09

When you install VMware Server 2.0 on Windows Server 2008, Internet Explorer will give you a warning that it cannot load the local VMware Server console web-site at https://servername:8333.

The reason is that the security certificate is self-signed by the local machine, not by a trusted CA.

Internet Explorer does not allow you to add that CA, but you can from within Windows Explorer.

The Removing the VMWare Server SSL Certificate Trust Warning article explains how.

Note that on x64 Windows Server 2008 systems, the VMware Server certificate by default is in the C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Server\SSL directory.

Finally, you will need to add https://servername:8333 to the trusted sites in Internet Explorer.

–jeroen

via: Removing the VMWare Server SSL Certificate Trust Warning – IIS Hacks Server and System Administration

Posted in Power User, VMware | 2 Comments »

VMware Workstation and multi-core hosts/guests

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/05/06

With the gaining popularity of Desktop systems with multi-core processors, it becomes interesting to use multi-core CPU guests in VMware workstation.

Right now, Intel Core i3 through i7 processors can provide from 2 to 6 cores, some cores even supporting hyper-threading and providing 12 virtual cores using a single physical processor.

Does it make sense now to run all your VM guests with multiple virtual cores / vCPUs?

On the VMware forums and knowledge base, there are many threads and articles with information on vCPUs.

The consensus is that VMware workstation can take longer to schedule a synchronized set of cores for a VM than VMware ESX(i) has, and the host OS needs CPU cycles too.

The reason is that VMware workstation needs the underlying host Operating System for that, whereas ESX(i) has it’s own kernel.

In the VMware workstation 7 beta, under some circumstances, adding more vCPUs actuall made the guest run slower (this has been fixed).

You need to be careful when vCPUs in the guest compete with pCPUs in the host; it can lead to frequent freezes in the guest.
The rule of the thumb is that you should not use more than 50% of the host pCPU cores as guest vCPUs.

So the best is to start with one (1) vCPU, and only crank it up when needed.
Take into account however that for Windows XP you will need to  change the HAL to support multiple CPUs, which can be a pain.

In some cases it can pay off big to increase the number of vCPUs, especially when they are actually used.

Another thing you need to be aware of is that modern CPUs van vary their clock speed, now even depending on the number of cores used. In the past this had influences on timekeeping, but not so any more with modern Core i# processors.

Finally, with the increase of hard-disk space, people use snapshots more often. This can dramatically decrease the performance, as the number of open files per VM increases.

I hope this helps you choosing the number of vCPUs in your guest.

–jeroen

Note: Both VMware ESXi and VMware Workstation 7.1+ can even support vCPU with multiple cores to help cope with guest OS CPU licensing limitations: set the cpuid.coresPerSocket property in your vmx for that.

Posted in Power User, VMware | 1 Comment »

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