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VMware vSphere Essentials

One of the interesting things coming up in VMware Infrastructure 4 or vSphere as it is now known is the new licensing options aimed at securing a bigger slice of the lucrative SME marketplace.
Many SME’s were put off on the pricing of VMware Infrastructure 3 with Enterprise and Virtual Centre licences for a couple of [...]

Copying files to and from an ESXi host

Software company Veeam have today released v3 of their free FastSCP program which now supports coping files to and from ESXi hosts without any hacking or modification required on ESXi.
The solution is able to copy powered off virtual machines to or from a Windows machine, jobs can be scheduled if required.
On testing managed a very [...]

Managing VMware server 2 using Virtual Infrastructure Client

I’d tried VMware server 2 back in beta but found I couldn’t get on with the new management web interface so stuck with my trusted VMware server 1.0.x
A colleague mentioned recently VMware Server 2 could be managed using the familair VI client usually used to manage ESX hosts.
Sure enough after downloading and installing the latest [...]

Unable to remove Consolidated Helper Snapshot under ESX and ESXi

If you are running ESX or ESXi U2 or above and have an application that creates VMware backups using snapshots (e.g Vizioncore , Veeam ) you may notice sometimes you are left with a snapshot called Consolidated Helper Snapshot followed by a number.
If you try to remove the snapshot on a powered on VM it [...]

ESX snapshot “An Invalid snapshot configuration was detected”

Received this error today trying to create a new snapshot of a Windows VM guest running on VMware ESXi. VI client showed no existing snapshots, tried reboot of VM and ESXi host but still unable to create a new snapshot.
Was eventually able to create the snapshot by renaming the snapshot definition file for the [...]

Importing a Microsoft virtual machine into VMware

You can use the free VMware converter tool to import Microsoft virtual machines into VMware. Most of the Microsoft product line can be downloaded for evaluation in a pre configured virtual machine format. Microsoft virtual machines come with a virtual disk with a file extension of VHD and configuration file with the extension [...]

Windows Server licensing and Virtual Machines

Spent sometime today clarifying Microsoft’s stance on licensing Windows Servers as virtual machines, this applies regardless of which virtulisatuion platform the VM’s are running on e.g. VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, Hyper-V.
With standard Windows server licences you have to buy a licence for each VM running Windows Server as the guest OS.
With an enterprise licence you [...]

64bit guest virtual machines won’t power up

Tried to install a 64 bit Windows 2003 VM today, threw up an error when trying to power on the VM, turned out Intel-VT hadn’t been enabled in the BIOS of the ESX host which is required for 64 bit guest support.

Poor performance of virtual machines on VMware ESX

Had and issue today with virtual machines running on an ESX host. the VM’s were exhibiting poor performance and relatively high CPU usage even when doing very little.
Problem was eventually traced to Intel-VT not being enabled in the ESX host BIOS, as soon as the ESX host had Intel-VT enabled in the BIOS performance increased [...]