A. Mikkelsen

Ever wanted a XP installation disc that only had the bare minimum of features and the smalest foot print?
The take a look at nLite and if you a a gamer also take a look at Game XP.

You can find a guide to both Freeware programs here.

Today i came accross a cool article about how to easy get your VM to boot from CD.

Read the full story here:

In summery:
add the following line anyware to your VM’s .vmx file.

bios.bootDelay = “boot delay in milliseconds”

Ex. Setting the boot delay to 15000 gives you 15 sec. to hit the F2.

Looking for a guide to upgrade your VMware ESX enviroment to ESX 3.5 and VC 2.5, then this guide from RTFM Education is a must read.

http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?p=482

RTFM Education has released a quick guide for ESXi

Get it here
http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?p=476

A new website will lanch soon http://govirtual.tv/

It will feature premire video tutorials and educational screencasts related to enterprise virtualization technology.

I’m looking forward to see what they can cook up.

Duncan over at YellowBricks.com found a undocumented fearure in the VCB config.js file

One of my customers wanted to use the default VCB framework but did not want to quiesce the VM for several reasons. (Databases, Active Directory etc.) I could not find an option in the config.js file but noticed the following in the file glue.js:

// A fallback to be able to switch to non-quiesced snapshots
if (typeof(NO_QUIESCE) != "undefined") {
cmd +="-Q 0 ";
}

In other words, setting the option “NO_QUIESCE” with no value in config.js results in the VM not being quiesced, default it will quiesce the VM! I added the following line to the  config.js file to accomplish this:

NO_QUIESCE=”";

Duncan over at YelloBricks.com posted a nice easy howto on renaming a VM from within VC and from the service console.

There are a couple of ways to rename a Virtual Machine, but there are two in my opinion that stand out:

1. Shutdown the VM
2. Rename the VM in VirtualCenter
3. Migrate the VM and move it to another Datastore
4. done!

And from the service console:

1. vmware-cmd -s unregister /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm/vmold.vmx
2. mv /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-old /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-new
3. cd /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-new
4. vmkfstools -E vm-old.vmdk vm-new.vmdk
5. find . -name ‘*.vmx*’ -print -exec sed -e ’s/vm-old/vm-new/g’ {} \;
6. mv vm-old.vmx vm-new.vmx
   for every file that hasn’t been renamed (.vmsd etc.)
7. vmware-cmd -s register /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-new/vm-new.vmx

Today i finally got time to upgrade this site to Wordpress version 2.5.
And i must say that i’m impressed with this new version.
It has a few new cool features and the admin pages design has changed alot - AND I LIKE IT. It is easier to find your way around the menus.

I can only say if you don’t already use Wordpress get your copy today - www.wordpress.org

The people over at Lostcrations have created the first known third party plugin to VC 2.5.

It enables you to SVmotion your VM’s VMDK’s between different storage locations

Take a look at it
http://www.lostcreations.com/code/wiki/vmware/viplugins/svmotion

Frane Borozan has created a automated script based on VMware Converter to take a physical server and make fresh replica of it on VMware Server.

It is worth a look.
http://www.p2vbackup.com

A. Mikkelsen