Excessive snapshot size but Snapshot Manager shows no snapshots?

Okay, so we got the alarm about excessive snapshot size and deleted snapshots.

It came back a while later and said "Unable to access file <unspecified filename> since it is locked"

Looking a little more closely, the snapshot was from commvault and it hadn't "Released disk lease" yet.

The end result is we still have a snapshot, which you can tell from the files in the VM's folder in the datastore, but snapshot manager shows no snapshots.

FIX:
Take a snapshot manually.

It will take a minute or so extra, but in the end it shows not only the one you created, but also the "Consolidate Helper- 0" snapshot

OVF

So, I rarely have to work with OVF files and they're a big pain every time I do and there are probably better ways to do this, but here's what I got to work:

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool>ovftool --network="<network you want to connect the VM to>" -ds=<datastore name> "<full path to appliance>" vi://<user>:<password>@<vcenter fqdn>/?ip=<ip of the host you want to initiate the copy to>

One additional thing I had to overcome was that the appliance was set to be hardware level 9 and I needed this in a v4.1 environment ... and the .mf file has checksums on the .ovf and the .vmdk

Special thanks to me already having a XUBUNTU instance going and to Jon Giffard's Blog for the instruction:

"openssl sha1  <filename>
This will give you the sha1 checksum.  Now edit the MF file and replace the old value with your new one.
vSphere will now deploy your appliance without complaining of a checksum error"

So yes, you can install Windoes8/Server12 in a VMware 4.x environment using the bios.400.rom trick.

That has worked well enough, but I learned a couple somethings over the last week.

Long story, but I'm moving my VMs to new datastores.

I could not get a Server12 VM to move. It is a heftier than normal VM, weighing in at 800GB and the move would go for hours and fail with:

A general system error occurred: Source detected that destination failed to resume.

Frustrating.

Eventually I asked the server owner if I could take it down for a day and get the move done, which went well until I went to power the VM back up.

Could not open bios.440.rom (No such file or directory).

I looked and no, the bios.440.rom file had not been moved. I re-uploaded it and the server booted fine.

VMware View Third-Party Certificates (Pre 5.0.1)

I always have to go back and do the searches again to find these when I need them.

For pre-View 5.0.1, doing the cert with keytool... These are the resources you need:

Familiarize yourself with both of them before proceeding. The TcpDump one is particularly good, buit it omits making a 2048-bit request.

TcpDump

VMware KB 1008705

FIX - VMware Windows 7 VM with no Audio [ESXi]

I have a template we make some persistent VMs from and they haven't been getting audio. For some reason it took me a little bit to track this one down.

Device Manager, add Legacy Hardware, Have Disk

C:\Program Files\Common Files\VMware\Drivers\vmwvaudio\vmwvaudio.inf

No reboot needed.

[If you don't have this directory you'll need to copy it from a system with working audio.]

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.