VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘plugin’

VI3 Enterprise features VMotion, DRS, and HA require identical virtual networking settings on all of your ESX hosts. Unfortunately, VirtualCenter does not apply a central configuration policy or inheritance of settings from the cluster. Maybe a future version of VirtualCenter will evolve to include global configuration abilities? Until such a version is created, each ESX server’s virtual networking settings will continue to be configured individually by most administrators. However, there are some time saving, global configuration options available today. This post summarizes two methods provided by the virtualization community for creating PortGroups simultaneously across multiple ESX hosts. Read the rest of this entry »

Brian Desmond’s Blog : How to Sysprep in Windows 2008 documents the new sysprep process for Server 2008. In this post, Brian explains that the current tools for Windows 2000 and 2003, using setupmgr.exe to create sysprep.inf, no longer exist.

“The first step is acquiring the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) from somewhere. You can get it from Microsoft’s website, MSDN subscriber downloads, and probably the volume licensing downloads site too I’d guess (though I haven’t checked). The ISO is available at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=94bb6e34-d890-4932-81a5-5b50c657de08&DisplayLang=en, and is about an 800MB install on my 2003 SP2 x86 box.

You’ll also need to copy the install.wim from your 2008 DVD sources folder to the hard drive as the tool won’t work with it if it doesn’t have write access.

The tool of choice is the Windows System Image Manager (WSIM)”

Check out Brian’s full post for screenshots and instructions of the entire 2008 sysprep process.

My thoughts after understanding this new sysprep process are now what changes to VirtualCenter will have to be made in order to include customization of Server 2008 in the deploy from template and clone VM wizards? Read the rest of this entry »

Some buzz was generated today when Andrew Kutz of Lostcreations.com announced a new svmotion plugin in the VMware Community forums. From http://communities.vmware.com/thread/126141:

SVMotion is a VI 2.5 client plugin (the FIRST released, third-party plugin in fact) that extends the client’s functionality by providing an integrated, graphical tool that can be used to invoke storage VMotion (SVMotion) operations. This plugin is not supported by VMware. In fact, the plugin is not anywhere close to supported by VMware because it is the result of a two-week dive into the inner-workings of the VI client libraries with popular reflection tools (reverse-engineering). l o s t c r e a t i o n s is working on a white paper that describes how to build VI plugins.

Read more about SVMotion and download it here http://www.lostcreations.com/code/wiki/vmware/viplugins/svmotion.

Replies to the post in the forum so far are positive.

It hasn’t happened to me yet, but enabling the Converter Enterprise plug-in apparently can crash your VC 2.5 Server. VMware Communities: Enabling Converter Enterprise Plugin … is a forum thread about the problem with some troubleshooting attempts and the resolution. From the VMware forum:

I had exactly the same problem and this was caused by a dll file confict, in my case I had an old version of the ssleay32.dll file in my windows\system32 directory. I removed the file and it now works correctly.

Yellow-bricks.com also reports on the problem with 2 posts and an alternative fix in the follow up – Part II post: Read the rest of this entry »