VMWare on Remko's Blog

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!

Magic Filter Preview

Sat, 10 Aug 2013 16:34:26 +0000

In Enterprise environments users are often working on a remote (virtual) desktop such as when using SBC or VDI.

They typically get a full screen session, perhaps on a thin client, and have not idea that they are using a remote desktop.

The Problem
However when they press Ctrl-Alt-Delete they get either the local Security Attention Screen / Task Manager or nothing at all if it has been blocked.

Clever users know they can use alternative key combinations such as Shift-F2 for Citrix or Ctrl-Alt-End for RDS.

But that's not the seamless experience we want to give our users, is it?

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!

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 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: