Yet Another IT Professional Blog

Yep... Another update and another bug. I just applied this months updates on my computer at home and guess what? It caused almost a "fatal" error on my VMWare Workstation virtual machines! As soon as my computer boots, I tried to fire one of my vms and I got the following scary message.

I've been experimenting with Microsoft's new cloud services, Windows Azure. The service is very versatile and practical. Basically, it's an online platform (or Portal as Microsoft calls it) you can create virtual machines, virtual networks, highly available redundant storage, databases, cloud services, web sites, web apps, active directory and the list goes on... So how and why would you use it? It was the first question I asked to myself and when I got my answer and experimented with it, I was totally blown away by the easy usage of it. You can instantly create a Lab environment to test new products. Takes about 10-15 minutes to create a couple of virtual machines connected together. So yeah, if you don't have a Hypervisor machine at home, go ahead and create your lab. But it's meant to be used by enterprises!!! Because all these resources are highly available and redundant. Microsoft spreads out it's datacenters pre...

I have a VMDK file that was used for a Windows Server VM as a secondary disk to store only archive files. When I had to scrap the VM and redo it from 0. As any lazy admin would do, I tried to be smart and just reinstall the OS on a different VMDK and copy over the secondary VMDK, rename it, attach it to the virtual machine and off you go… Things are never as easy as you imagine it would be with computer systems J . Here is another adventure of just a renaming simple VMDK file; If VSphere Gui doesn’t let you rename a file, you can do it through a PuttY ssh session;  Open an SSH session to one of your hosts.   Browse to your DataStore which has the VMDK file. cd /vmfs/volumes/DatastoreName/originalname Use the following command to rename a file;    vmkfstools -E "originalname.vmdk" "newname.vmdk" For more information about manipulating files in datastores or using the “vmkfstools”; http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?c...