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Hello everyone, I have recently started to provide support to a small secondary school. They have a Server 2019 VM running on ESX and it's just started to Blue Screen. The VM is running the school's RD Gateway. The BSODs are either SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION or ATTEMPTED_WRITE_TO_READONLY_MEMORY and it also shows NTFS.sys. Has anyone else come across this before and if so, how did you go about resolving it? Many thanks in advance.

Hello, I'm wondering how people have configured their VM's in ESX to shutdown in an event of a power failure? Since I've got the Network Shutdown option for my UPS server I could install the client agent in each machine and configure it that way and also install it on the ESX Physical Host as well. The other method which might be best is to use the inbuilt system in ESX to automatically startup and shutdown machines. Has anybody used this? Thanks, Rob

Hi all Quick question... I've got a vmware setup at my current place, set up by an ex member of staff. I know very little about vmware, so I unsure about what I need to do to add an additonal ESX(i) server. We have the following: vmware vcenter server standard 4.1.0 and 2 X ESX 4.1 hosts. I want to add a third host, but have a couple of questions: - With what I currently have, do I need to change any of the licensing? I'm of the understanding currently that I won't, as vcenter server standard allows for more than two hosts as part of the license? - Can I install the latest version of ESXi (as opposed to ESX) and add it as part of vCenter, along with the two current ESX hosts and expect full compatibility between them (moving VMs etc)? Thanks

Not sure how long its been out but they have sorted PowerChute to work with Hyper-V, ESX etc. for free rather than charging a bunch extra for it. Good stuff APC, it took a while but you did fix it. Software / Firmware=

Hi all, I've been playing with Xen, VMware ESX and Hyper-V for a little while and I was just wondering if there seems to be a consensus of which is most popular in a school environment? If you are using one of these virtualisation technologies in a school/education system or are likely to soon, would you mind voting in the poll to show your preference? If you look at threads like this one then you can see a huge use of VMware in more enterprise-level setups, and certainly everything I've read and seen would suggest VMware ESX is the most powerful virtualisation technology out there. However, here are my personal experiences with the three technologies: Hyper-V - Disappointing, far more complex to set up than it needs to be, and only supports Windows (and SUSE Enterprise) guest VMs. Even in it's Core form, I personally find Server 2008 to be much more work to configure and manage than setting up a ESX or Xen host. If you want to do things properly then you need SCVMM (and a MS SQL server). Costs are good as it will be mostly 'free' for those who have MS volume licensing. Xen - I considered Xen to be the underdog as it hasn't got the large deployments of VMware or the big name of Microsoft behind it, but so far it has really impressed me. It is so unbelievably easy to set up and use, the XenCenter console take two minutes to install and configure, and there's no dependence on a central management server or SQL database to control your setup. Does anyone know where the pool config is stored with Xen - presumably it's replicated across the hosts? VMware ESX - I really wanted to love this product, but so far it hasn't impressed me that much. Maybe vSphere will be better? The ESX Hardware Compatibility List seems pickier than Xen (not a problem if you're buying new servers, but it was a real pain to have to buy new NICs to fit in brand new Dell desktops for testing), it requires a dedicated VCenter Server that needs an SQL database (you can't really virtualise this box so does it not become a single point of failure?), and seems far more awkward to set up than Xen. My Xen setup was as simple as building a couple of hosts (five minute each), installing XenCenter (two minutes), configure a LUN on a SAN (two minutes), create a Pool on XenCenter, add the hosts and a Storage Repository from the SAN (five minutes), tick High Availability (two seconds) and I've got a failover-level setup... With Hyper-V and ESX doing this seems a lot more complicated, or is it just me? Many thanks, Chris

Hi all, I know this is kind of a virtualisation question, but since most of the S7000 users are in here I figured it was the best place to ask. I'm just about to do some benchmarking using our Sun 7410 and VMware with NFS. The iSCSI figures have been excellent so I'm hoping for good results with NFS, but I've never used it before so I'm a bit in the dark! I've made a new share on the 7410, set NFS as read/write (NFS is enabled and running), added some basic 'Domain Admins' permissions on the Root Directory, but left the Share Level permissions blank as it's not a CIFS share. When I try to add the NFS share in vSphere I give it the hostname, the export path and pick a datastore name, it gives me: Error during the configuration of the host: Cannot open volume: /vmfs/volumes/whatever I don't suppose anyone would be able to point me in the right direction, and also explain how NFS permissions work? With iSCSI I can set initiator security and CHAP, what stops any random user accessing my NFS share? Many thanks in advance, Chris

While updataing one of our ESX hosts the updates failed and the host now doesn't boot. The only way to fix it is a fresh install from CD, I've heard that in the next version of vsphere ESX hosts will no longer be supported and this seems like a good opportunity to start migrating. Should I install ESX or ESXi? VCenter is currently at release 4.1.0 258902.

Hi all, Just posting to make you aware of a major issue with the way VMware handles the indexing of the ChangeID. Unfortunately the ramifications are rather large...if your chosen backup software does not do a '*' ChangeID backup (i.e. a query for all 'dirty' or used blocks in a VMDK after a 'revert', or a 'goto' in a snapshot tree) and a duplicate "unique" ChangeID is used for the backup then your backups could well be corrupt. There is more information on Tom Howarth's blog site which basically covers the jist of the problem. Major Issue with Change Block Tracking | PlanetVM As far as I know esXpress 4.0 is the only backup product to date that has confirmed a current implemented workaround for this issue. If a backup taken of a machine has a snapshot esXpress forces the changeID to * what this means it will copy ‘all dirty blocks’. This is obviously a bit slower, but until VMware fix the CBT issue it is 100% reliable.

We have downloaded and installed the Citrx VDI-in-a-Box trial and installed onto a ESXi 5.0 server. Must say we are pretty impressed so far with the provisioning of Windows 7 virtual machines to users. We have just ordered some trial Android tablets to test and see how useable a VDI solution will be on a tablet via the Citrix Receiver app. Does anyone down in the South West area currently have a Citrix VDI-in-a-Box solution in production? We are interested in taking a look at one in action with more users than we can currently get on our trial. To know of any problems etc...

Just posting to let you all know that the new version of esXpress "4.0" was released about 10 days ago. I posted it on my blog here: VMware Backup – esXpress 4.0 released | Virtualization Spotlight The key change to the release is reliable Change Block Tracking, as of now esXpress is the only virtual backup solution that validates the CBT data for each backup, ensuring data integrity and reliability.

I'm setting up ESX with two server and a SAN. Out storage array is an HP 2012fc with 12x 450gb 15k drives. One big lun, or loads of different ones? I'm thinking just the one, since I'll get better performance with the data spread accross more drives. What did you do? EDIT: Could a kind passing Mod please change the thread title to "ESX, how'd you set your LUNs up?" Ta