I recently read a post by Duncan Epping over at Yellow Bricks where he tried to resize the VMDK of a Windows XP VM running on ESX\vSphere. When he used the VI Client to try and resize the VMDK he was actually unable to because it was ghosted out. By coincidence I had experienced the same problem a week before Duncan after building 5 Windows XP VMs for stress testing of a new SharePoint website. As Duncan mentioned, the only other time I had seen this happen was when a snapshot existed for the disk that needed to be resized. Quickly checking the VM's settings I noticed that by default, when you create a Virtual Machine using the 'Microsoft Windows XP Professional..." Guest Operating System container it actually attaches an IDE disk rather than a SCSI disk (Server 2003 and 2008 Guest Operating System containers use a SCSI disk by default.)
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I recently came across a problem when uploading a document through an ASP application to an IIS 7.5 web server. When I attempted to upload the document I received an http 500 internal server error. It turns out the issue was caused by an IIS setting restricting the size of the entity-body of the ASP request.
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When I received my Windows 7 upgrade media for a new HP laptop I wanted to perform a clean install of the OS. During the installation process, I was able to perform a clean install using the Custom (advanced) option when prompted for the 'type of installation' to proceed with.
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Something I have frequently seen implemented incorrectly on Windows Server domains is time synchronization. Many admins think that by creating a GPO with a modified policy setting for 'Configure Windows NTP Client' (and using it to address an NTP source) all Servers and Clients will synchronize their time with that source. This isn't entirely true and there is actually a time hierarchy that should be considered when implementing time synchronization for each domain.
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When I first started using VMware ESX I was testing VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) to dump my virtual machines to a staging area before being copied offsite. I noticed that one of the VMs had a VMDK attached that as far as the OS (Windows Server 2003) was concerned with had all of the data deleted on that volume. After initiating a VCB dump (backup) on the VM I noticed that the VMDK that was dumped to my staging area strangely appeared to contain data. The VMDK size was considerably larger than it should have been for a disk that Windows reported as containing zero data.
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I'm personally not a big fan of iTunes but I recently noticed an issue where a couple of users had installed it and it had defaulted to saving their music library to their Home Directory. This usually wouldn't be an issue for most people but I redirect Home Directories to a share on a file server. In order to mitigate against what could have potentially been a requirement for additional disk storage I decided that advising users to change the location of their iTunes library from the default (which unknown to the users was a file server) to a local location on their computer was the best option. Here is a generalized version of the instructions I gave to network users.
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Our company Intranet was deployed on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 and has been in operation for a few months. I recently had a user that reported that they were experiencing difficulties opening documents from their Team Site. A quick check revealed this problem actually affected all documents for the user and not just those in their Team Site. When the user clicked on any SharePoint document to open it they were presented with the dialog box with options to open the document in 'Read Only' or 'Edit' mode. Opening any document in 'Read Only' mode opened the document in the relevant Microsoft Office application but obviously did not allow them to save it directly back into SharePoint. Opening any document in 'Edit' mode failed to launch the Microsoft Office application associated with that document. This was the case for all Microsoft Office document types.
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Following on from a previous post about creating and using an RDP Hyperlink on a computer running Windows, I have written another two .bat files for use with SSH and SCP protocols.
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I recently started using Zenoss (an open source application, server and network management platform) to monitor servers. One of the options that can be configured for each of the devices being managed is a hyperlink that can open a website or application of some relevance. In a situation where I am informed of an issue with a server/application I instinctively try to open a Windows remote desktop session to the server. This used to involve manually opening the Microsoft Terminal Services Console (mstsc.exe), keying the server name and then clicking the connect button. I wanted a way to click a hyperlink from the Zenoss web console and establish an rdp session to the relevant server.
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When vSphere 4 became available I was keen to upgrade all of my hosts and vCenter servers to start testing features like Fault Tolerance, Site Recovery Manager, and vCenter Linked Mode e.t.c. The host upgrade went smoothly using VMware Update Manager. Similarly, the upgrade of all vCenter servers was also without issue. A short while after, I needed to add RAM to a group of hosts and all was fine until I booted the first host post upgrading it's RAM.
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