VM-Aware

I had a need for a floppy drive for a server that didn’t have a physical device. I know I could use a USB floppy, but the customer didn’t want a USB floppy hanging off the brand spanking new IBM x3650 servers.

The need arose from a feature in DataCore’s SANMelody software that allows any modifications of the configuration to be written to a backup floppy for config recovery purposes. This is a great feature that I really wanted the customer to use so I hunted for a Virtual Floppy drive that would allow it to be presented to Windows as though it was a physical device.

I ended up with a fantastic piece of software called Virtual Floppy Drive 2.1. This software acts as a proper read/write floppy drive that can mount existing floppy images and add, remove, edit files. It can also create a blank floppy image and have applications write to it directly.

Best of all it is freeware. Perfect!

Sanbarrow has released a masterpiece for all administrators out there. The MOA LiveCD is a fine example of what true dedication can bring you.

3 years in the making the LiveCD allows you to boot into BartPE style environment with VMware related applications installed. The idea being that you can attach a physical disk for forensic/repair purposes etc.

Other useful applications include RoboCopy to get your important files off before the hard drive fails for good. Registry backup tools, VMware Converter and a multitude of others.

It comes in at 500mb, but you can run it from a USB key (if you have a degree of dedication) or CD.

Download it here, read all about it here.

Alongside a few other cool tools MightyCare Solutions have released StorageView.

This handy little app will give you visibility of your Virtual Machines’ disk status in a very friendly GUI. (more…)

Ever found that FastSCP (the best file copying tool around for ESX!!) times out when trying to copy files to your ESX box? Do you get the following error:

Transfer timeout. No data transferred in the last 20 seconds
Operation canceled

I did and I worked out what the problem was!

It’s all to do with the ESX firewall. FastSCP uses a range of ports from 2000 - 2500 by default. These ports are not open by default in ESX so you either open them, fairly easy to do using the command line, or you do what I did and used the GUI to do it for me. (more…)

The Internet is a wonderful thing. I had a problem ‘VI Client doesn’t install on Vista x64′ and the Internet solved it.

Well to be more specific somebody over at DABCC solved my problem with a fantastic walkthrough document that can be found here.

It provides links to a couple of useful MSI editing tools and gives in depth how to references for each point.

Great!!

Here is a very interesting article about how you would go about mounting a LiveCD across the interenet:

http://vamosproject.org/InternetBoot

One day I seriously believe all Operating Systems will run in some derivative of this format.

This one is nice and easy to implement if you are running VMware Player/Workstation on Linux, but it does work on Windows using httpfs. It wasn’t as fast on Windows for me, by a long shot, but it still worked and illustrates the point really well.