Blackforce

To restart the service management port on ESX and ESXi carry out the following commands :

ESX

service mgmt-vmware restart

ESXi

/sbin/services.sh restart

I upgraded my Mac to OS X 10.7 Lion the other day and found that USB devices no longer worked.

They appeared in device manager saying they could not start.

I found the following fix on the VMware forums :

You can check if you have non standard permissions by opening a terminal and running:

ls -ld /

You should see output like this:

drwxr-xr-x 53 root wheel 1870 Aug 4 12:43 /

If the permissions are different than above you can reset them using the following steps (for Fusion 3.1.3):

Shutdown Fusion.

In a terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)

sudo -s
chown root:wheel /
chmod 755 /
Reboot

Start Fusion and try connecting a USB device.

Source : VMware Forum

To use EVC, you must be running ESX 3.5 Update 2 or higher with VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2 or higher and have compatible processors in your servers. EVC does not allow for migration with VMotion between Intel and AMD processors.

Note: To search for supported EVC CPU types, see the charts below or refer to the WebHCL and search by EVC Modes.

CPU Charts can be found by clicking Here

Had an issue yesterday where once a VM was rebooted you no longer had any network connectivity.

You couldn’t ping the gateway or ping anything.

Running the following resolved the issue.

Start, Run, regsvr32 polstore.dll

Reboot and your away.

Recently we deployed some Windows Server 2008 R2 RDS virtual servers to a customer. All was working well until a number of users were deployed to the servers. The servers would freeze for the users on the server when another user logged in. It would freeze at the preparing local session manager stage

After opening a support call with Microsoft we were instructed to rebuild the server on a physical server. On a physical box the problem went away.

Eventually it was found that adding another CPU to the VM resolved the issue. Vmware were also able to recreate the issue and an official bug has been logged for their product.

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