Last week I bought a brand new OCZ Agility Series 60 GB SSD for my workstation as OS disk. I started a fresh Windows 7 64-bit installation and made some software tweaks for optimal performance. Down here some of those little settings to maximize your performance.
I already upgraded the firmware to the latest level v.1.5
My computer specs: click here
The NoDrives tool creates a ADM files to remove the icons representing selected drives from My Computer and from Windows Explorer. Also, the drive letters representing the selected drives do not appear in the standard Open dialog box.
This tool creates a easy to use Group Policy Template. You do not need to calculate the drive value you only have to check the drives you want to hide and create the ADM.
Few days ago I read some information about memory tweaking on my PC / USB ESXi 4.0 whitebox. I got the this hardware configuration at home:
The OCZ Gold 3 stripes with 2 GB each are default rated on 1066Mhz, but they can communicate with 1600Mhz (triple channel!). Time to change some settings in the bios of my Asus P6T SE motherboard.
When Creating a snapshot for a virtual machine fails
Or you receive the error:
File is larger than the maximum size supported by datastore
Note: This error does not occur on ESX 3.5 or earlier.
ESX 4.0 is able to detect when a snapshot file at maximum size cannot fit into a datastore. Instead of allowing the file to be created, which may not work correctly if it grows to big, ESX cancels the operation and displays the above error.
To confirm if the snapshot files may be too big, compare the size of the virtual machine’s base disks against the block size of the datastore which contains the virtual machine’s working directory.
Note: If you are using Raw Device Map, you should compare the size of the RDMs instead of the base disks.
VMware Infrastructure 3 Support
| VMware ESX 1, 2 | General Availability Date |
End of General Support |
End of Extended Support |
End of Technical Guidance |
| Version 3.5 | 2007/12/10 | 2010/05/21 | 2013/05/21 | 2015/05/21 |
| Version 3.0 | 2006/06/15 | 2008/12/10 | 2011/12/10 | 2013/12/10 |
| VMware ESXi 1, 3 | General Availability Date |
End of General Support |
End of Extended Support |
End of Technical Guidance |
| Version 3.5 | 2008/01/10 | 2010/05/21 | 2013/05/21 | 2015/05/21 |
| VMware Consolidated Backup 1 |
General Availability Date |
End of General Support |
End of Extended Support |
End of Technical Guidance |
| Version 1.5 | 2008/07/25 | 2010/07/25 | 2013/07/25 | 2015/07/25 |
| Version 1.1 | 2007/12/10 | 2009/12/10 | 2012/12/10 | 2014/12/10 |
| Version 1.0 | 2006/06/15 | 2008/12/10 | 2011/12/10 | 2013/12/10 |
| VMware vCenter Server (formerly VirtualCenter Server), VMware Vmotion, VMware HA, and VMware DRS 1 | General Availability Date |
End of General Support |
End of Extended Support |
End of Technical Guidance |
| Version 2.5 | 2007/12/10 | 2010/05/21 | 2013/05/21 | 2015/05/21 |
| Version 2.0 | 2006/06/15 | 2008/12/10 | 2011/12/10 | 2013/12/10 |
Some “blogging” colleagues posted their home lab configuration on the internet, see the list below:
I own 3 physical machines that I moved a few months ago to the datacenter at my work in Soest (the Netherlands). With a VPN tunnel from my Cisco ASA 5505 (at home) to the datacenter, my 50/50 mbit ISP, it feels like the systems are near me 
Read more…
Latest Version: 2.8 | January 31, 2010
RVTools is a windows .NET 2.0 application which uses the VI SDK 2.5 to display information about your virtual machines and ESX hosts. Interacting with VirtualCenter 2.5, ESX 3.5, ESX3i or ESX4i RVTools is able to list information about cpu, memory, disks, nics, cd-rom, floppy drives, snapshots, VMware tools, ESX hosts, datastores, switches, ports and health checks. With RVTools you can disconnect the cd-rom or floppy drives from the virtual machines and RVTools is able to list the current version of the VMware Tools installed inside each virtual machine. and update them to the latest version
Whats new:
On vHost tab field "# VMs" now only powered on VMs are counted.
On vHost tab field "VMs per core" now only powered on VMs are counted.
On vHost tab field "vCPUs per core" now only powered on VMs are counted.
On vDatastore tab field "# VMs" now only calculated for VM’s which are powered on.
Health check "Number of running virtual CPUs per core" now only powered on VMs are counted.
Health check "Number of running VMs per datastore" now only powered on VMs are counted.
During Installation there will be an application event source created for RVTools. This to fix some security related problems.
Some users run into a timeout exception from the SDK Web server. The default web service timeout value is now changed to a higher value.
New fields on vHost tab: NTP Server(s), time zone information, Hyper Threading information (available and active), Boot time, DNS Servers, DHCP flag, Domain name and DNS Search order
New Health Check: Inconsistent folder names.
Improved exception handling on vDisk, vSwitch and vPort tab pages.
Download: here
Information: here
Source: here
VMware Infrastructure Management Installer | 29 Jan 2010 (Localized version)
VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 6 | 29 Jan 2010 | Build 227640
Virtual Infrastructure Client | 29 Jan 2010 | Build 227671VMware Infrastructure Management Installer | 29 Jan 2010 (English only version)
VirtualCenter 2.5 Server Update 6 | 29 Jan 2010 | Build 227637
Virtual Infrastructure Client | 29 Jan 2010 | Build 227637
Guest Operating Systems Customization Improvements
Customization support for the following guest operating systems has been added in this release:
For more complete information about supported guests included in this release, see the VMware Compatibility Guide.
Support for Firefox 3.x Browsers with VirtualCenter Web Access
This release adds support for Firefox 3.x browsers with VirtualCenter Web Access. Firefox 3.x is not a supported browser for ESX Server 3.5 Update 5 Web Access with this release
Note: In many public documents, VMware ESX Server 3.5 is now known as VMware ESX 3.5, and VMware ESX Server 3i version 3.5 as VMware ESXi 3.5. These release notes continue to use the earlier convention to match the product interfaces and documentation. A future release will update the product names.
Source information: VMware
Information: VMware vCenter Upgrade Guide
Carlo Costanzo from VMwareInfo.com has posted the following helpful article:
The SVGA II driver installed by VMware Tools doesn’t work with 2008 R2 or Windows 7. Console sessions will randomly lockup.
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/218244?start=105&tstart=0
According to the thread there is a WDDM driver in U1 that you can install manually to fix the problem by browsing to -
“C:\Program Files\Common Files\VMware\Drivers\wddm_video“
A good one
