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.

APPLIES TO

• Windows Server 2008 R2
• Windows Server 2008
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003,
• Microsoft Windows 2000

Download it here.

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.

Read more…

I stumbled upon this reg key a few weeks ago. If you want to change the default folder view for all users on the local machine use HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. If you want to change it for a single user then use HKEY_CURRENT_USER.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ShellNoRoam\Bags]
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ShellNoRoam\BagMRU]
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags]
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\BagMRU]
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ShellNoRoam\Bags\AllFolders\Shell]
“WFlags”=dword:00000000
“Status”=dword:00000000
“Mode”=dword:00000004
“vid”=”{137E7700-3573-11CF-AE69-08002B2E1262}”
Read more…

All of the elements and processes indicated in the graphic above are covered by granted (not just requested) European Patents. These patents would have been rendered legally enforceable by the soft patent directive which the European Parliament managed to reject in 2005, as a result og the awareness raising from Eurolinux, the FFII and concerned software professionals from all over Europe. However, the still unresolved legal uncertainty has recently allowed some companies to enforce soft patents in Europe. New projects of European institutions are underway to create a centralized patent court that would decide case law favorable to soft patentability.

Patent regimes dilute our ownership of our commercial assets, our web applications and sites. So while copyright protects the fruits of our work, patents take them away and protect empty talk of others. ‘Inventors’ may author patent applications without any skills in software and business development. Most patents in our field are extraordinary trivial. Contrary to popular belief it does not stem from sloppy patent examination but subject matter. General business ideas or software conceptions are not scarce in any way. Soft patents don’t impress us and we do not care who first came up with them. Entrepreneurs who transform common visions into great products and commercial success earn our respect.

A patent portfolio is a powerful tool for an established player to fence out an emerging competitor and delay creative destruction of its market. Patent trolls will extort you once you succeed commercially. As a consequence of legal ambushes more and more innovators stay away from a ‘mined’ innovative market. Do we need patents for defense then? At least against trolls patents are barely useless. They do not sell any product which could infringe upon our patent. When we commercially fail a troll will obtain our ‘defensive’ patents and sue competitors.

Software patents don’t impress you at all? You embrace open competition for the best solution, in terms of commerce or technology? You don’t fear sharing and imitation but legal minefields? Join us and make a difference.

Dear VMware Certified Professionals,

First, let us say thank you for supporting VMware’s certification program! We appreciate our VCPs who have worked hard over the past few months to achieve our newest certification, the VCP on vSphere 4. In order to meet the December 31st 2009 deadline, many of you recently scheduled (and hopefully passed!) your exam with our testing partner. In fact, so many of you scheduled exams that some of our VCP professionals were unable to find a testing center with available seats prior to the December deadline.

In order to accommodate participants that despite best efforts were unable to schedule their exam prior to the deadline, VMware will continue accepting the VCP3 certification as a qualification to take the VCP4 exam without requiring attending the ‘What’s New" class through January 31st 2010. We fully expect that the additional four weeks will allow remaining participants ample time to find a testing center with available seating, and will NOT be extending the deadline any further, so please take advantage of this opportunity! Regards, The VMware Technical Certification Team

When attempting to upgrade ESX 4.0 to ESX 4.0 Update 1, you may experience the following symptoms:

• Update Manager (VUM) upgrade operation fails or times out at 33%.
• Upon reboot, the host that was being upgraded displays a purple diagnostic screen with the following error:
  COS Panic: Int3 @ mp_register_ioapic  

Customers using VMware vSphere 4 upgrading to Update 1 with 3^rd party management agents running.
Read more…

To install vcb follow the instructions on this link.

The first time I came in contact with vcb I created some batch files to make vcb snapshots. I encountered all kind of problems. Snapshots that vcb didn’t remove. unexpected errors no vss support and some more issues.

To overcome some of these problems I created a vbs script vcbBackup.vbs. The full howto is comming soon for now only the code. Read more…

We already posted a solution. This is the official unofficial unsupported VMware KB

• You cannot launch the vSphere Client
• If you install the vSphere Client in Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 and try to connect to the vSphere server, you see the errors:
  • Error parsing the server "<servername>" "clients.xml" file.
  • The type initializer for VirtualInfrastructure.Utils.HttpWebRequestProxy’ threw an exception.

The vSphere Client is not currently supported in Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 and it does not run in Compatibility Mode.

This issue may occur because of the .NET loading mechanism change in Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7.

There are 2 possible workarounds. Perform one of these options:

• Install a Windows XP virtual machine in Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 using Windows XP Mode.
• Bypass the normal .NET Framework loading mechanism.
  Warning: This workaround is unsupported.
  To bypass the normal .NET Framework loading mechanism:

1. Download the file system.dll. This file is typically located in  %SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\ directory of a non-Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 machine with .NET v3.5 SP1 installed.

2. Copy the file to C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\lib.
Note: If the lib directory does not exist, create it.

3. Open VpxClient.exe.config in a text editor. The file is located at C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher.

4. Add the following three lines to VpxClient.exe.config, just before </configuration>:
<runtime>
<developmentMode developerInstallation="true"/>
</runtime>

5. From Windows 2008 R2 or Windows 7 System Properties, click the Advanced tab > Environment Variables.

6. Create a new System variable called DEVPATH and assign the value:
C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\Lib
Note: For 32bit operating systems, replace Program Files (x86)with Program Files.
You can now launch vSphere Client from a Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 machine. You may have to right-click on the vSphere Client icon and choose Run as administrator.

vSphere 4.0 introduces a new para-virtualized network device – VMXNET3.  We recently published a paper demonstrating its performance characteristics, compared to that of enhanced VMXNET2 (the previous generation of high performance virtual network device from VMware).

Some highlights of this paper are:

(1) Throughput gains of up to 92% for 10G TCP/IPv4 Rx workloads with large socket buffer, which greatly improves bulk data transfer performance in a data center environment.

(2) Dramatic gains across all configurations of IPv6 traffic, with significant CPU usage reduction and throughput improvement over enhanced VMXNET2.
In a nutshell, VMXNET3 offers performance on par with or better than its predecessors on both Windows and Linux guests. Both the driver and the device have been highly tuned to perform better on modern systems.  Furthermore, VMXNET3 introduces new features and enhancements, such as TSO6 and RSS. TSO6 makes it especially useful for users deploying applications that deal with IPv6 traffic, while RSS is helpful for deployments requiring high scalability.  Moving forward, to keep pace with an ever-increasing demand for network bandwidth, we recommend customers migrate to VMXNET3.
For more details, please read our full paper from here.