VMWare on Remko's Blog

Google Earth fix for XenApp, RDSH & Horizon

Mon, 20 Feb 2017 20:26:51 +0000

Both Google Earth and Google Earth Enterprise do not work correctly for multiple users on shared Hosted Shared Desktops (I still prefer to call it Server Based Computing but that’s likely because I’m an oldtimer).

Problem summary
So let’s look at the actual issue: the first user on a server is able to launch Google Earth but for any subsequent users on the same server Google Earth fails silently.

Problem details
Google Earth uses various synchronization objects such as Events and Mutexes but registers those in the \Global namespace instead of the \Local namespace.

Upload ovf/ova to vCloud Director with PowerShell

Wed, 14 Oct 2015 10:08:49 +0000

Recently support for NPAPI has been removed from Google Chrome. While understandable from a security point of view it does mean that some plugins no longer work.

A good example is VMware's Client Integration Plugin where we've lost the ability to upload an ovf template. While VMware has published a fix for vCenter (see this kb), it has not been fixed for vCloud Director:

Deploy VCSA 6 to vCloud Director or vCloud Air

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 20:11:47 +0000

In versions prior to 6.0 VMware supplied the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) as an OVF template that could be imported directly.

Starting with version 6.0 the installation process has changed and now consist of an .iso file containing a custom, HTML based, installer. Vladan Seget has a nice blog post where he describes the installation.

This installation process is annoying, it needs a separate client (Windows) machine to run the installer on, requires the Client Integration Plugin (which doesn't appear to run well on chrome now that support for npapi/dpapi has been removed):

But even worse is that we cannot import VCSA 6.0 in vCloud Director. Even converting the OVF inside the iso file doesn't help because vCloud directory lacks support for Deployment Options.

Dumping passwords in a VMware .vmem file

Mon, 25 Nov 2013 08:54:34 +0000

Benjamin Delpy the author of the well known mimikatz toolkit has released a very cool extension to WinDbg today.

In summary the extension can extract Windows passwords from memory dumps, hibernation files and Virtual Machine .vmem files (paging, snapshots).

Especially the ability to extract passwords from .vmem files was very interesting. So I decided to to test this out, so let's see how it works!

Setup was unable to verify drive C while installing Windows NT4 Terminal server on VMWare

Thu, 10 May 2012 13:56:29 +0000

For a research project I tried to install Windows NT 4 Terminal Server on VMWare Workstation (version 8).

The setup would always fail however with the following error:

Obviously the installation doesn't really fail because of too little memory and neither is the installation disc (an iso file) corrupt, it's a bug.

Virtualized Mac OS X Freezes

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 15:12:39 +0000

I am running a virtualized Mac OS X machine in my VMWare Workstation but I noticed that after a period of inactivity the virtual machine would sometimes freeze.

Because this only happens after inactivity I assumed it had something to do with Power Saving so I changed the Energy Saver settings and that fixed it!

Deleting scheduled Altiris tasks from SQL

Tue, 03 May 2011 10:27:30 +0000

I needed to delete around 50 scheduled tasks from several machines in Altiris because something went wrong in on of the first jobs.

It would have better if the jobs were configured to fail on error and not continue but they weren't.

Deleting the jobs from the Altiris console is very, very, slow. First the console asks for confirmation (after showing the hourglass for a long time):

Then the actual delete can take a few minutes and then the next server and so on.

I decided to delete the tasks directly from SQL.

I know this is not preferred but I think in the end it's safe enough because I found a stored procedure called del_event_schedule which looks like this:

sql Download

ALTER procedure [dbo].[del_event_schedule]
 @schedule_id int
as
 begin transaction

 delete from event_schedule where schedule_id = @schedule_id

 if (@@error != 0)
 rollback transaction
 else
 commit transaction

So al it does is a (transacted) delete from the table.

Extremely slow Virtual Machines on HP Smart Array P410

Mon, 02 May 2011 14:15:50 +0000

I was deploying virtualized Citrix XenApp Servers on HP BL460c G6 servers and somehow the storage (direct attached) responded very slowly.

I had expected reduced performance (see my earlier post) since I didn't have the Battery Backed Write Cache module installed.
I did order them but had to start deployment before they arrived.

I did not however expect such an extreme bad performance. Deployment took ages or sometimes failed completely and when logging in to a VM it responded very sluggish.

Disk Latency

I looked in the vSphere console what the Disk Latency was. Latency under 10ms is usually considered good while a latency between 10 and 20ms is a potential performance problem.

I was shocked to notice that the Disk Latency was much higher with peaks toward 2.000 ms (2 seconds!):

Add VMXNET3 driver to Windows PE PXE Image

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:20:08 +0000

After compiling the VMWare VMXNET3 Driver for Linux I needed a driver for the Windows PE Image as well.

Compared to what I needed to do for Linux this was a breeze!

First we need the VMWare tools again so I grabbed windows.iso from /vmimages/tools-isomages.

The driver files are in a cab file, VMXNET3.cab, extract this cab file somewhere and open the Altiris PXE Configuration tool.

Select the Windows PE Entry and click Edit:

Then click Edit Boot Image:

Compiling Drivers for Altiris Linux PXE Image Part 2

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 15:39:12 +0000

In the previous part we have already setup the Ubuntu Virtual Machine and we did a build of the kernel image.

So now we can finally compile the driver, in my case I needed a driver for VMWare’s VMXNET3 Network Card.

VMXNET3 is VMWare’s paravirtualized network driver and offers better performance with less host processing power compared to the default e1000 driver.

First we need the source for the driver, we can obtain this from the VMWare Tools either from a running Linux VM or like I did by transferring the file linux.iso from /vmimages/tools-isomages from the vSphere server.

In the iso file is a single file, VMWARETO.TGZ and after unpacking we get a folder called vmware-tools-distrib.

In vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source we find the vmxnet3.tar file that contains our sources. Copy the tar to the Virtual Machine and unpack it, then start a Terminal and cd to the directory where you unpacked the tar.

The first time I attempted a compile I received an error indicating that the file autoconf.h could not be found. After I found this bug report I was able to fix this by creating a link:

bash Download

sudo ln -s /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.35-22-generic/include/generated/autoconf.h /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.35-22-generic/include/linux/autoconf.h

We can compile the driver with the make command, referencing the kernel image we created earlier:

Compiling Drivers for Altiris Linux PXE Image Part 1

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 13:07:22 +0000

First we need to setup a Linux Virtual Machine with a distro of choice (I recommend a 32 bit version). I will be using Ubuntu here and the first step is to download the iso.

At the time of writing Ubuntu 10.10 was the Latest version so I used that one.

Create a new Virtual Machine and use the iso as install media, I am using VMWare Workstation and it recognises Ubuntu and performs an “easy install”:

The install is unattended (when VMWare Tools are installed you need to perform a login) and took only 6 minutes on my laptop!

Now we need to install gcc (the compiler), open the Ubuntu Software Center:

STOP: 0x0000005D when booting Windows PE

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 12:47:13 +0000

I was booting a new VMWare Virtual Machine with Windows PE through Altiris for initial deployment but Windows PE halted with a BSOD:

Windows 2003 align OS disk

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 15:11:48 +0000

If you read one of VMWare's Best Practices Guides (in my case this one) then you may have read that it's important to align guest partitions.

We can do this (for Windows OS) using the DiskPart tool that comes with the OS since Windows 2003 SP1 (there is a hotfix for earlier versions).

On Windows 2008, and higher, all partitions are automatically aligned to a 1 MB boundary.

But how to do this for the OS disk on Server 2003?

My first thought was to open a command prompt during setup, right before creating the partitions and then use diskpart.

However the OS partition is created during the Text portion of the install process and even though we can get a cmd prompt using SHIFT-F10 we get the recovery console (which has a builtin diskpart but cannot align).

So I used a Windows PE bootdisk. Any version with Diskpart should do but I used a bootdisk from Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery that I've customized to my own needs.

If you boot the original Symantec disk you can open a command prompt by accessing a hidden feature: move the mouse above the "S" from Symantec until you get a Hand icon and press the left mouse button:

Booting a Virtual Machine from USB Drive

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 12:59:53 +0000

I wanted to boot a Virtual Machine from an USB Stick but even though you can Connect USB devices to VMWare you cannot boot from it.

It can be done however using a boot manager that is able to perform a boot from USB media. I used Plop Boot Manager.

Download one of the stable releases (I used 5.0.11-2) and extract plpbt.img from the archive and mount this (don’t forget to select the Connect at power on option) and when booting press Esc for the Boot Menu.

This would be a good time to Connect the USB device to the Virtual Machine, right click the USB device in the bottom bar:

And select the Connect option:

Click OK on the warning message:

The case of the UPS discovery not working

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 15:22:03 +0000

I am doing a project involving a Citrix Xenapp environment running on VMWare vSphere.

The physical machines are powered by two Eaton Uninterruptable Power Supplies that both a network card.

I received some documentation that describes how to implement automatic shutdown in a VMWare vSphere environment.

This documentation describes that a vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) must be deployed in which we need to install some software from Eaton.

I followed the documentation that even described the needed iptables rules needed for their software.

In the last step a discovery is done and the UPS is supposed to be found. And you have probably guessed by now: it didn’t!

At first I figured that maybe the iptables configuration was still too tight so I stopped the iptables service but that didn’t help.

BSOD with STOP 0x0000008E when installing Window 7 Checked Build

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 23:13:01 +0000

I was trying to install a checked build of Windows 7 under VMWare Workstation but after the first reboot during the install (the completing installation step) the system came up with a BSOD.

It can be fixed by adding a line to the VMX configuration file:

Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.1

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 22:33:10 +0000

VMware has released an updated Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere document for 4.1.

The document provides tips that help administrators maximize the performance of VMware vSphere 4.1.

Chapter 1 - “Hardware for Use with VMware vSphere,” provides guidance on selecting hardware for use with vSphere.

Programmatically Create Aligned Partitions

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 18:14:56 +0000

After deploying Virtual Machines from a template and adding disks the next Task was to create and format the partitions.

In a VMWare environment it is very important to assure that the partitions are aligned. VMWare has a nice document that explains the details called Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.0.

Basically the recommendation is to align partition on a 64 KB boundary, not only for VMWare itsself but also for the guests.

Of course we could do this manually but I wanted to run this task of from my Deployment Server to automate the following:

Create aligned partitions on all extra disks of the maximum size
Format, assign drive letter and assign a label
A safeguard to prevent overwriting existing Data

Well enough talk let's go the scripts! They are written as bat files that can be executed directly in Altiris as an embedded script but of course you don't need Altiris to use them.

VM not joined to Domain after Deploying from Template

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 16:50:01 +0000

As I wrote earlier today I am provisioning Virtual Machines with PowerCLI. I don’t know if this is intentional behaviour but after Deploying (Cloning) a Virtual Machine from a template the Network Adapter is not automatically connected at power on.

Cannot complete customization when cloning from Template

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 11:24:32 +0000

I am currently provisioning a lot of Virtual Machines in VMWare vSphere 4.1. Because I had already sized the Virtual Machines I am doing this from PowerCLI based on my Excel Sheet.

I will probably blog later about the details of how I am doing this in PowerCLI (would you be interested in that?) but after successfully deploying some Windows 2008 VM’s I got this error in PowerShell:

text Download

New-VM : 3-11-2010 10:00:50 New-VM The operation for the entity VirtualMachine-vm-150 failed with the following message: "Cannot complete customization."

At C:\Users\Administrator\Documents\NewVm.ps1:64 char:14

+ $VM = New-VM <<<< -Name $Name -VMHost $VMHost -Template $Template -OSCustomizationSpec $Spec -DiskStorageFormat $DiskFormat -Datastore $LargestDataStore

+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [New-VM], CustomizationFault

+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : Client20_TaskServiceImpl_CheckServerSideTaskUpdates_OperationFailed,VMware.VimAutomation.ViCore.Cmdlets.Commands.NewVM

In the vCenter console the following error was logged:

text Download

Cannot deploy template: Cannot complete customization.

The case of the VMware vSphere Client

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 21:59:32 +0000

Today I connected with my laptop to VMWare Virtual Center using vSphere client. Because I had an older version of the client I needed to update and the installer failed with this message:

I remembered this error from the last install of this client (about a year ago), it happens because Microsoft Visual J# was already installed (in my case it was previously installed by Embarcadero’s Rad Studio).

Last year I “fixed” it by modifying the msi file but I remembered that Assarbad posted an easier solution on his Blog a while ago.

His solution was to set a public property in the MSI (USING_VIM_INSTALLER) but it means we need to unpack the installer exe first to obtain the MSI file.

Change Driveletter Commandline Tool

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 14:04:35 +0000

Some time ago (2008 actually) I wrote a tool that can assign driveletters given a volumename. I use it myself after SysPrep operations to assign the desired drive letters. For instance after cloning a Virtual Machine from a template.

I noticed that I updated this tool sometime after the original post but never uploaded it here. The most important changes are:

Error while creating large Datastore on VMWare vSphere 4.1

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:12:43 +0000

I was trying to create a (very) large Datastore on VMWare vSphere 4.1 but although VMWare correctly identifies the LUN on my SAN it refuses to create the Datastore and gives me this error:

The complete error text is

text Download

Call "HostDatastoreSystem.QueryVmfsDatastoreCreateOptions" for object "ha-datastoresystem" on ESX "<IP of ESX>" failed.

Slow power on and storage operations with HP Smart Array P410i controller on VMWare vSphere 4.0

Sat, 16 Oct 2010 11:00:00 +0000

As you may have read I am currently implementing VMWare vSphere 4 on several HP Proliant DL380 G7 machines.

I ran across an interesting knowledge base article from VMWare that describes a possible issue that is summarized as "Power on and storage operations are slow with the HP Smart Array P410i controller".

VMWare Workstation and Virtual PC XP Mode: unrecoverable error

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:33:46 +0000

I just installed my laptop with Windows 7 (x64) and I was curious how the new Windows XP mode worked (more on that topic later). After installing it I could no longer start any Virtual Machines in VMWare Workstation. The VM fired up but immediately halted with the following error: “VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0)” “VCPU 0 RunVM failed: -2”.