Its usual practice to RDP to a Virtualcenter box and then access the Console of Virtual Machines. However today I had a customer where when they went to the console screen of the VMs it just was black. No image was drawn at all.
Restarting the Virtualcenter server and the ESX servers did not resolve the matter.
The solution in the end was to increase the colour depth of the RDP session. With 256 Colours the Console screen is not drawn. Never knew that.
If you have been unfortunate enough to find yourself with loads of snapshots in ESX and have snapshots with file sizes bigger than a couple of GB. Then you might be scared to commit them in case of data loss.
You can easily get rid of all the snapshots without any data loss. Using the VMKFS tools you can clone out the hard drives in their current state including snapshots to 1 VMDK. To do this run the following when SSH’d in.
vmkfstools -i harddrivename-000001.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/datastore/ new foldername/new_harddrivename.vmdk
Then it will clone the drive. This may take a couple of hours depending on the size of your drive. Then you just attach the new drive to a newly created VM.
VMware Knowledgebase : 1002458
Found out a nifty command which allows you to find out what VM’s have Delta / Snapshot files. Run this when SSH’d in.
find /vmfs/volumes/ -name "*delta*" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 du --human-readable --total
I’ve been playing round with VMware Workstation recently. I’ve found a neat trick that you can do with it which could allow you to run trial software indefinitely without registering it. I suppose this could also be used for Beta’s of windows etc. This should also work on Vmware ESX, Workstation and Vmware Server. (Vmware Server is Free)
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Categories: Technical Tags: esx, keygen, power, registration, rtc.startTime, serial, server, trial, vm, VMware, windows, workstation, xp