VMware Workstation 8.0.1 Released

What’s New

Highlights of VMware Workstation 8.0.1 functionality include:

  • Graphics performance and compatibility enhancements.
  • Improvements in creating and using shared virtual machines and remote virtual machines.
  • Ubuntu 11.10 is officially supported as a guest operating system.
  • Disk and memory management issues have been addressed.
  • Many customer-reported issues have been resolved.

VMware Workstation 8.0.1 is a free update for all VMware Workstation 8 users.

Resolved Issues

The following sections list the resolved issues in VMware Workstation 8.0.1.

  • Windows 7 guest installation failed after powering on the virtual machine with the error A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy disk,
    CD, DVD, or USB flash drive, please insert it now.
  • VMware Tools failed with the message VMware Tools unrecoverable error.
  • VMware Tools failed to start in Fedora 15 guests.
  • An Ubuntu 11.10 guest crashed with a signal 11 error if you installed or upgraded VMware Tools.
  • On hosts with Nvidia GeForce and Quadro video cards, some of the clouds in the Unigine Heaven Benchmark application were drawn solid black.
  • Easy Install did not properly function on Ubuntu 11.10.
  • If remote virtual machines were open, you could not shut down the Windows hosts.
  • When transitioning from Full Screen mode to Exclusive mode, the Full Screen toolbar sometimes failed to hide.
  • Host memory reservation restrictions on Windows hosts are more relaxed in VMware Workstation 8.0.1 than in previous versions of VMware Workstation.
  • CD/DVD mount Linux.iso failed while installing VMware Tools in Ubuntu 11.10 guests.
  • The AltGr key was not working in an Ubuntu guest in Unity mode when the host and guest keyboards were both set to a layout that contained the AltGr key.

MDT 2012 Beta 2 Monitoring

Today I upgraded a MDT 2010 installation to MDT 2012 Beta 2.

One of the new features is monitoring Glimlach

To Configure monitoring you find a tab Monitoring on properties of the Deployment Share.
You must set a V Enable monitoring of this deployment share

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Under the root of the Deployment Share u see now Monitoring. When you click on Monitoring you can see running deployments.

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MDT 2012 Beta 2 Released

The latest version of MDT is now available on Connect (Join the MDT 2012 Beta 2 Connect program here!)

MDT 2012 Beta 2 offers new User-Driven Installation components and extensibility for Configuration Manager 2007 and Configuration Manager 2012 as well as integration with the Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolkit (DaRT) for Lite Touch Installation remote control and diagnostics.

Key benefits include:

  • Full use of the capabilities provided by System Center Configuration Manager 2012 for OS deployment.
  • Improved Lite Touch user experience and functionality.
  • A smooth and simple upgrade process for all existing MDT users.

New features For System Center Configuration Manager customers:

  • Support for Configuration Manager 2012 (while still supporting Configuration Manager 2007)
  • New User-Driven Installation components for Configuration Manager 2007 and Configuration Manager 2012
    • Extensible wizard and designer, additional integration with Configuration Manager to deliver a more customized OS experience, support for more imaging scenarios, and an enhanced end-user deployment experience
  • Ability to migrate MDT 2012 task sequences from Configuration Manager 2007 to Configuration Manager 2012

New features For Lite Touch Installation:

  • Integration with the Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolkit (DaRT) for remote control and diagnostics
  • New monitoring capabilities to see the progress of currently running deployments
  • Support for deploying Windows to computers using UEFI
  • Ability to deploy Windows 7 so that the computer will start from a new VHD file, “Deploy to VHD”
  • Improved deployment wizard user experience

MDT 2012 the final release will be available download through to January 2012 I think.

VMware PowerCLI Configure Multipath Policy

Today i  needed to configure the Multipath Policy from “Most Recently Used” to “Round Robin (VMware) on our vSphere 4.1 and HP EVA4400 environment. After reading “Configuration best practices for HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) family and VMware vSphere 4” I decided to change the path status

To check the status of the Multipath Policy you can run the following PowerCLI script:

Per host:

Get-VMhost ESXHOST | Get-ScsiLun -LunType disk
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Per Cluster:

Get-Cluster CLUSTERNAME| Get-VMHost | Get-ScsiLun -LunType disk

To change the Multipath Policy you can run the following command:

Per Host:

Get-VMHost ESXHOST | Get-ScsiLun -CanonicalName "naa.6005*" | Set-ScsiLun -MultipathPolicy "roundrobin"

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Per Cluster:
get-cluster “Cluster Name” | Get-VMHost | Get-ScsiLun -LunType disk | Where-Object {$_.MultipathPolicy -ne “RoundRobin”} | Set-ScsiLun -MultipathPolicy “RoundRobin”

Special thanks to: VMPROS

VMware View XP persistent disk can not save outlook.ost c:\document and settings\…..

I’m busy with created a new a new pool with presentment disks.

The View desktops we’ve got setup are using linked clones and persistent disks which map to the D:\ in the users sessions. Of course this means the users profile is loaded to the D:\ instead of C:\ in the virtual desktops. My issue is, when a new users comes from our old environment into the test view setup, their Outlook is trying to find their OST file on the C:\ (c:\document and settings\…etc). The users data has been loaded to the D:\ though. The only way I’ve found to get around this is going into the Contol Panel in the users session, deleting their Outlook profile,

Solution:

Microsoft saves information about profile under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\Outlook

So, within regedit, I right-clicked on HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\Outlook then chose Export. For Save as Type, I changed the value to "Text Files (*.txt)". I then opened the text file I created with Notepad. You can’t just search for "Outlook.ost", since there are null, i.e. 00, characters stored between each character. They show up in an ASCII representation as dots. E.g. Outlook.ost would be O.u.t.l.o.o.k…o.s.t.

Since the "Outlook.ost" could be broken across multiple lines, I decided just to search for o.s.t. I found the following in the text file I had created.

Value 31

  Name:            001f6610

  Type:            REG_BINARY

  Data:           

00000000   43 00 3a 00 5c 00 44 00 – 6f 00 63 00 75 00 6d 00  C.:.\.D.o.c.u.m.

00000010   65 00 6e 00 74 00 73 00 – 20 00 61 00 6e 00 64 00  e.n.t.s. .a.n.d.

00000020   20 00 53 00 65 00 74 00 – 74 00 69 00 6e 00 67 00   .S.e.t.t.i.n.g.

00000030   73 00 5c 00 4a 00 69 00 – 6d 00 5c 00 4c 00 6f 00  s.\.J.i.m.\.L.o.

00000040   63 00 61 00 6c 00 20 00 – 53 00 65 00 74 00 74 00  c.a.l. .S.e.t.t.

00000050   69 00 6e 00 67 00 73 00 – 5c 00 41 00 70 00 70 00  i.n.g.s.\.A.p.p.

00000060   6c 00 69 00 63 00 61 00 – 74 00 69 00 6f 00 6e 00  l.i.c.a.t.i.o.n.

00000070   20 00 44 00 61 00 74 00 – 61 00 5c 00 4d 00 69 00   .D.a.t.a.\.M.i.

00000080   63 00 72 00 6f 00 73 00 – 6f 00 66 00 74 00 5c 00  c.r.o.s.o.f.t.\.

00000090   4f 00 75 00 74 00 6c 00 – 6f 00 6f 00 6b 00 5c 00  O.u.t.l.o.o.k.\.

000000a0   6f 00 75 00 74 00 6c 00 – 6f 00 6f 00 6b 00 2e 00  o.u.t.l.o.o.k…

000000b0   6f 00 73 00 74 00 00 00 -                          o.s.t…

I could also have searched in the .reg file I created when I exported the registry information from the other computer. But, again, you can’t just search for "Outlook.ost" in the .reg file you created, either, since the information in it is the hexadecimal representation of the binary data in the registry keys. You would need to convert a string, such as "ost" to hexadecimal form. You can do that at String – ASCII, HEX, Binary Converter. In the String field, I put in ost. The converter showed me the equivalent hex value is 6F 73 74. Note: the converter shows decimal/ASCII, binary, and hex values. Make sure you use the correct one. Also note that the hexadecimal representation of "OST" is not the same as "ost". Since the error message I received referred to Outlook.ost, I converted "ost" to hexadecimal. Again, it may be better to limit the length of the string to reduce the chance it will be broken across multiple lines in the file.

Once you have the hexadecimal equivalent of the ASCII string, you still can’t just search for it, i.e. a search for 6F7374 wouldn’t work. The hexadecimal numbers are stored in the .reg file with commas and the null character, 00, between them. I.e., I would need to search for 6f,00,73,00,74 instead.

In the .reg file found it among the following lines:

"001f6610"=hex:43,00,3a,00,5c,00,44,00,6f,00,63,00,75,00,6d,00,65,00,6e,00,74,\

  00,73,00,20,00,61,00,6e,00,64,00,20,00,53,00,65,00,74,00,74,00,69,00,6e,00,\

  67,00,73,00,5c,00,4a,00,69,00,6d,00,5c,00,4c,00,6f,00,63,00,61,00,6c,00,20,\

  00,53,00,65,00,74,00,74,00,69,00,6e,00,67,00,73,00,5c,00,41,00,70,00,70,00,\

  6c,00,69,00,63,00,61,00,74,00,69,00,6f,00,6e,00,20,00,44,00,61,00,74,00,61,\

  00,5c,00,4d,00,69,00,63,00,72,00,6f,00,73,00,6f,00,66,00,74,00,5c,00,4f,00,\

  75,00,74,00,6c,00,6f,00,6f,00,6b,00,5c,00,6f,00,75,00,74,00,6c,00,6f,00,6f,\

  00,6b,00,2e,00,6f,00,73,00,74,00,00,00

I noticed it was associated with a "001f6610" entry. When I had searched the text file, I had also seen Outlook.ost associated with "Name: 001f6610".

You can delete the following registry key with group policy preferences to disable using Offline Folders after disabling Use Cached Mode in Group Policy:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\Outlook\13dbb0c8aa05101a9bb000aa002fc45a\001f6610

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