Fixing VMware Workstation 8 and insserv
Not too long ago VMware has a product called “VMware Server” which originally came with a dedicated management application. Later VMware threw out the console and created a web interface for VMware Server. Not long after that they completely threw VMware Server away in favor of their new enterprise software solution(s) ESX/ESXi/vCenter/vSphere/etc. For the new(ish) VMware Workstation 8 one of the most notable features is the “Shared VMs” which is more or less a reawakening of their original VMware Server application functionality. With this feature you can once again set VMs to run in the background, autostart, and access via network. However a problem arises with the installation on systems which use insserv. Read on and I’ll explain the problem and show you how to fix it. Read more
VMware Removes Some Functionality
I happen to use quit a diversity of VMware products both for personal use and work. On my work laptop I have been using VMware Workstation now for a few years. When working with ESX(i) or VMware virtualization technologies in general I used to love some of the great lesser documented utilities which comes with Workstation. Two utilities that I have used rather extensively were vmware-mount and vmware-vdiskmanager. After upgrading to the latest VMware Worstation v8 I was super impressed with some of the great new features. However, when trying to convert a virtual disk (vmdk) using vmware-vdiskmanager I was awfully disappointed to see some functionality left out on this version. Read more
Convert OVA/OVF VMware to QEMU/KVM/Virtualbox
Drawing on discoveries made in a previous post we can use the vmware-mount -f to get access to a raw disk image inside VMware’s proprietary compressed vmdk. Once there converting this raw disk image to other virtual disk images is a snap. Read more
Rescue Data From a Corrupt VMware Appliance
Recently I ran into a spot of trouble trying to import a VMware Appliance. It seems as though I suffered some data corruption and I could no longer import or convert the appliance. Recreating the appliance wasn’t a huge issue but there were some configuration files and scripts in the appliance which I simply had to have. A Google search told me that there was no way to mount the compressed vmdk file – but it is possible. Read more
Load Balancing MOSS on ESX with CISCO
I was recently doing some Field Support for a customer who was having issues load balancing two Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 frontends. The work around was well documented but took some time and searching before I was able to get a working solution. Therefore I post the information here in hopes that it might prove useful.