When updating VMware Tools the setup constantly bailed out without a decent error. So I decided to un-install the Tools and install them again. Un-installing went smooth but when installing it again I ended up with the error “internal error 2203”. After googling this error the Citrix website gave me the solution, check your tmp and temp environment variables. Indeed both variables pointed out to the CD-Rom player for some strange reason. I changed it to c:\temp and the installation of VMware Tools went smooth…
VI Powershell: Creating a PSDrive to browse your inventory
Just stumbled upon this cool article about mounting your VI inventory as a drive via Powershell:
source – Hal Rottenberg aka halr9000:
- Establish a connection to your the server using the Get-VIServer command:
Get-VIServer -Server
for example,Get-VIServer -Server 192.168.10.10
When prompted, provide the administrator’s username and password to authenticate access on the server.- Get the root folder of the server:
$root = Get-Folder -NoRecursion- Create a PowerShell drive named VI, based on the server root folder. You can use the built-in New-psDrive cmdlet.
New-PSDrive -Location $root -Name vi -PSProvider VimInventory -Root '\'
In this release, a single backslash is the required value for the -Root parameter.- Access the new drive by typing the following command:
cd vi:
To list the drive content, use Get-ChildItem or its alias Dir.- Navigate through your server inventory using the cd command with the full path to the host. For a fictional VI inventory it may looks like the following:
cd Folder01\DataCenter01\host\Web\LiveHost01
Hyper-V and Linux guests
I was just pointed out to a blog about Hyper-V and linux guest compatibility.
Wednesday, Microsoft said Hyper-V beta for Windows Server 2008 is feature complete. Included in the list of operating systems supported are Windows Server 2003 SP2, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1, Windows Vista SP1 (x86), and Windows XP SP3 (x86). See John Fontana’s article for more details about the Hyper-V RC announcement.
Though I’m anxious for Hyper-V to be released, especially the standalone version (which is not what this RC announcement was about), I’m very disappointed in Hyper-V’s lack of support for Linux.
No offense to SUSE Enterprise Server crowd, but only providing SUSE support in Hyper-V is a huge mistake. By not supporting Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, and BSD, Microsoft is telling us Hyper-V is a Microsoft only technology. More Mt. Redmond, Microsoft center of the universe thinking. That’s disappointing.
What the hell, no support for Red Hat? After checking the “live migration” video that was posted recently this is another punch in the face of MS and in the end also Novell. They can try to defend MS/Hyper-V but these articles don’t make things better, they should have bought Xensource when they had the chance.
New VMware patch download section
It took me a while before I got used to the new layout of the VMware website, especially the forums and blogs… But the new download section is definitely an improvement. Just tick the patches you need and click download. A “download manager java applet” will be launched which will download the patches into the default location. This is the only thing I would love to see improved, I should be able to change that download location before the patches are downloaded. Don’t leave the download page while downloading by the way!
Overcommiting memory, the war is on…
I blogged about this yesterday, and a couple of hours later several articles on this topic popped up on the VMware website. Read them, and be prepared for another round of Citrix/MS blogs trying to discredit this feature. In my opinion it’s simple any feature that lets me virtualize more users / servers on the same or less hardware without significantly reducing the performance is worth looking into/testing. Looking at the “Services”(SBC/VDI) that are discussed in these topics I can imagine why Citrix is fully defending their technology and discrediting this feature, this is something that they didn’t think of or have developed yet.
- VMware: Memory Overcommitment in the Real World
- Scott Lowe: More on memory overcommitment
- Cheap HyperVisors
- The comment
- The Discussion
Talking about competition and cheap hypervisors…. Rumors are going around that Dell will be supplying servers with VMware ESX 3i with any additional costs, free, no license… So the war is on, but before you guys start bashing check the numbers in article number 1… 178 VM’s with 512MB of memory only using 19.07GB instead of the 89GB is would be using otherwise.