TIP: vMotion VLAN or Else

The impact of not following the 'best practice' of putting my vMotion and Management traffic on a dedicated VLAN seems to have finally showed itself.

I've been on a persistent VM for 3+ years now. It's been great, except for occasionally I'd get 'Session Lost!' on my zero client. It didn't happen often enough to concern me ... until it did. It was around this time that we started noticing several of us were being kicked off simultaneously. Those of us on 100Mb had issues, but not those of us on 1000Mb.

Thanks to having Riverbed Cascade we could see that the smaller ports were being flooded and overwhelmed by broadcasts from a vMotion port. Two days after establishing the VLAN and I have seen zero sessions lost.

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1736018

FIX - Windows update cannot currently check for updates because the service is not running

I've run into this message a couple of times and since I've had to search on it both times, so I'm documenting it here.

Windows update cannot currently check for updates because the service is not running.

The fix, each time, has been to go into Updates, Change Settings, Choose to 'Never check for updates' and OK, then back to wherever you want it and OK again.. You should now be able to search for updates.

Tip - Moving Windows ODBC Connections

On the system with the connections you want, export HKLM\SOFTWARE\ODBC\ODBC.INI
On the receiving system, rename ODBC.INI to ODBC.INI.BAK before adding.