I was trying to convert the great Nostalgia Virtual Appliance to a VMware Workstation compatible format but just copying didn’t work. I did the following to get this thing running directly under VMware Workstation 6.02:

I exported the Nostalgia VM from VirtualCenter 2.5 into an OVF format.
Copied the OVF files to my PC(d:\ovftools).
Downloaded the OVF Tool […]

Lane Leverett pointed me out to the fact that it’s possible to add a firewall service instead of opening up a huge range or multiple ranges for one service by hand. This way a junior system engineer can easily open up a port range via VirtualCenter instead of the console. I tried this in our […]

VMware updated the PDF about High Availability with extra advanced options for ESX 3.5/VC 2.5. They’ve also added recommendations for additional Service Console redundancy. Until now I’ve always worked with a two nic based Service Console instead of a second Service Console on the VMKernel network, will test with the second Service Console to see […]

mRemote has just released version 1.0. For those who never heard of mRemote, it allows you to manage all your remote connections in a single place. It currently supports the RDP, VNC, SSH, Telnet, RAW, Rlogin, ICA and HTTP/S protocols. Pick it up at sourceforge.net.

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During a VMware healthcheck at one of my customers I ran across the following error in /var/log/vmkwarning: “Memory is incorrectly balanced between the NUMA nodes of this system which will lead to poor performance. See /proc/vmware/NUMA/hardware for details on your current memory configuration.”

An often made mistake when trying to open up or close a port range with the ESX(3.0.2 and 3.5) firewall is using the dash(-) as a divider. Using the dash unfortunately does not always result in an error. To open up or close a port range you should use a collon(:) as a divider:
esxcfg-firewall –openport […]

Virtual Iron 4.2 has officially been released. Virtual Iron uses the Xen Hypervisor and positioned their product “Virtual Iron Enterprise Edition” as a competitor of VMware ESX. This new release includes a couple of long awaited features:

VMware just officially released VMware ESX 3i, you can download the installable iso here. For now it’s only supported on Dell Poweredge 2950(Full) and HP DL380G5(Experimental) servers. Check out the installable, I booted it within VMware Workstation and right until I tried to boot a VM it worked fine, than it crashed.

When patching ESX Hosts with iSCSI attached SAN’s it’s possible you encounter the following event when starting a VM:
“A general system error occured: The system returned an error. Communication with the virtual machine may have been interrupted.”

After a p2v there are several “ghosted devices” left in the VM. This could for instance cause a message about having already assigned the same ip-address to another nic when assigning .