Uninstalling vranger pro 4.0DPP

Uninstalling vranger pro 4.0DPP

Today I had problems with uninstalling vranger pro 4.0Dpp.

Was getting the error.

Vranger Pro Service couldn't be stopped. – Reason: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.





A quick solve is to stop the vranger pro services (start run services.msc) and them uninstall it again.

Demo video's vsphere from Mike laverick

Mike Laverick created a lot's of demo material for vmworld.

Unfortunately i'm not going. Even with the link to the letter Which Eric Siebert provided me i could't go;) link to letter

For people that aren't going but still want's the information check
http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk

More input i love it ! did i mention i love the internet? :D

Sysprep file locations and versions vmware

Running sysprep without files can be hard ;) Vmware has a kb about this which is very handy. All the information is in one place. See link at the bodem.

Description:

Symptoms
When attempting to customize the deployment of a virtual machine the radio buttons are disabled (greyed out).
When a virtual machine (VM) is deployed from a Template, you find that the SID is always the same, despite the fact thatyou chose the option to generate a new SID during Template deployment and guest operating system customization.
When attempting to create a new virtual machine from a Template in ESX v3.5 you receive the following error message:

Warning: Windows customization resources were not found on this server
Message in the guestcust.log:
deploy doesn't contain known sysprep files

Link to Knowledge base

Vmug.be 19 june

Last week there was a nice vmug event in belgium. They couldt pick a better place then PALM. I loved the presentations and had a chance to speak to some people. But wow who made the A12(road) in belgium! Bad design! ;)

The presentations are online

•8th meeting on 19 June 2009 - Palm -
download vSp presentation
download Command Central presentation
download backup consistency presentation
view Powershell in a Nutshell Presentation)

http://www.vmug.be/vmug/fullpage.cfm?id=3

Vmware library

A collegea of me had a usefull tip. The online library of vmware.

With a nice little search function ! :)

http://pubs.vmware.com/vi35u2/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm

And alot of console commands
http://www.b2v.co.uk/b2vguide2vmware3.htm

Disable screensaver on vmware machines

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=9275881

* Screen savers are not necessary for virtual machines
* Running screen savers wastes CPU resources
* There is no interface option to disable the screen saver on the log on screen in Windows



To disable Windows Logon Screen Saver:
Click Start > Run, type regedit, click OK.
Locate the following registry key:

HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop


Double-click the ScreenSaveActive string value item in the Details pane.
In the Value data box, replace the number 1 with the number 0 , and then click OK.
Alternatively, you can save the attached registry file and double click it. The key above is set for you (Windows 2000 and 2003 only).

For more information, see Microsoft KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/185348 .
Note: The preceding link was correct as of June 4, 2008. If you find the link is broken, please provide feedback and a VMware employee will update the link.

Vmware perfmon "addin"

Scott Drummonds created the following post on the vmware communities:
They are busy too ! :)


My colleague in product management, Praveen Kannan, has been working to extend Perfmon to show some ESX performance counters. This capability is automatically installed with VMware Tools on vSphere 4. But Praveen and I have made a stand-alone version available to those of you that are still on VI3. Download it here to give it a try.

To install, place the file in an appropriately-named directory on any Windows VM on VI3. Double-click the executable, which will self-extract the files into the same directory. Run "install.bat" and you're done.

Once you bring up Perfmon you'll see two new performance objects on your computer: "VM Memory" and "VM Processor". These objects contain counters exposed by ESX that accurately reflect the VM's memory and CPU usage. Here's Perfmon on my test VM after I've installed the tool.

Disclaimer:
This is a pre-release "sneak peak" version. Eventually this tool will be available for download on vmware.com and supported by VMware. But today there is no support for this tool and you're using it "as-is". Use at your own risk and do not contact VMware support for help with this release.


The post:
http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/drummonds/2009/06/18/using-perfmon-for-accurate-esx-performance-counters
The tool:
http://ftpsite.vmware.com/download/vmStatsProvider/vmStatsProvider_006_release.exe

vsphere-land

2 much to read :) but its wonderfull info!

http://vlp.vsphere-land.com/

Handy vmware console commands

Handy commands
http://www.b2v.co.uk/b2vguide2vmware3.htm

Version of sysprep

ICT-freak has a great post about the sysprep version. Which one to use on vcenter server.

See

http://ict-freak.nl/2009/05/12/vmware-determining-the-correct-version-of-sysprep-to-use/

Add role to user

In my quest to learn vmware:
Adding permissions to a user.


Use the VI Client to connect to the ESX server.
Select the Server in the left pane, and then click on the Users & Groups tab in the right pane.

Create User:
Click on the Users button
Right Click and Select Add
Specify the desired User Name, Password, etc and Click OK

Create a Local Group
Click on the Groups button
Right click and select Add
Enter the group name you want and enter the User Name you created above in the User Name field and click Add
Click OK to create the group

Assign Permissions
Click on the Permissions Tab
Right Click and Select Add Permission
Click on the Add button and select the Group you created above and click on the Add button.
Click on the OK button.
Make sure the Assigned Role is set to Read-Only and click OK.


The information was from this thread. Thanks bflynn0!~
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/101775

Buslogic to Lsi

Why this is necessary
Vmware recommended setting is to use the LSI driver instead of the Buslogic driver. The purpose of this document is to increase the performance of the virtual machine by changing the SCSI adapter from Buslogic to LSIlogic.

1.2 How to
Make sure the machine’s harddisk is on persistent.
Browse to the datastore.
Download the vmx file to your desktop.
Always keep a backup of the vmx file. So make a extra copy of it.

We are manually installing an extra scsi LSI controller in the vmx file.

Open the vmx file in Notepad ++ make sure it is working in unix format. Because it could happen that the vmx file is wrongly read by esx if it is in windows format.
Find the entry in the vmx file.
scsi0.present = "true"
scsi0.virtualDev = "buslogic"
If it does not exist’s create the entry.

Now we are going to add the new lsi scsi adapter.
Add the line behind the scsi0.
scsi1.present = "true"
scsi1.virtualDev = "lsilogic"



Save the vmx file.
And upload it to the datastore.

Boot the machine and see that u have 2 scsi controllers!


one lsi and one buslogic.
Login to the machine and check device manager.



If the driver is not automaticly installed (click search )
Then download the driver from www.lsilogic.com search for LSI20320 (windows xp x86 32bit)
Do not install the latest driver (as written1.28) but download WHQL 1.20.18.00 MID 1005239 Initiator/Target bios/fw and Microsoft Certified driver.

Once installed shutdown the virtual machine.
Download the vmx file.
Edit vmx file.
Remove the 2 entries
scsi1.present = "true"
scsi1.virtualDev = "lsilogic"
Save the vmx file
Upload it to the correct datastore.
Change the scsi driver from buslogic to lsilogic.
Boot the machine and you will have a much better performance

Vmware products voming in 2009

List taken from Eric sloof's blog ntpro.nl.
Updoming products.

• VMware Fault Tolerance
• VMware VMSafe
• VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch
• VMware vShield Zones
• VMware vCenter CapacityIQ
• VMware vCenter Data Recovery
• VMware vCenter ConfigControl
• VMware vCenter Orchestrator
• VMware vCenter Chargeback
• VMware vCenter AppSpeed

Buslogic to LSI on esx

Ok its written all over the internet but im gonna do it again :)

We have some machines on our esx env. that are still on buslogic configuration. We want to change this to LSI (recommended config by vm). To have a performance increase.
Enviroment (38 xp machines buslogic non persistent)
Steps to take
Shutdown vm
change diskmode
Download the vmx file
edit vmx file
add lsi scsi
upload the vmx file
boot with 2 scsi adapters
shutdown vm
edit vmx file

Ps dont download the latest version from lsilogic. The 1.28.3.0 does not work correctly in windows xp.
I now used 1.20.18.0 from the lsilogic website. This is working. On the esx server itself the version 1.21.26.0 is installed. Not figured out how to use this in the windows xp installation.