Since VCenter 4.1, installing on a x64 machine is different. The major difference is that you now need a 64 bit System DSN, but which is not so easy to set up using the normal odbcad32.exe. You need the SQL Server 2008 Native Client before the VMWare VCenter 4.1 installation recognises your System DSN.
VMWare
BlueBear Kodiak 0.0.3 out
Today, I received my invitation to BlueBear’s new Kodiak 0.0.3. Kodiak is a virtual infrastructure management tool created in Adobe’s AIR and should be multi-platform in both server and client technology. Currently, any AIR platform is supported as client platform, and from Kodiak you can manage VMware ESX, ESXi and Server products. BlueBear claims that Xen support is underway, and HyperV should happen in the future too.
I’ve been trying Kodiak now for a few hours on OS X and although it looks pretty and helps me visualize my test environment running on VMware Server 2, I am still unable to use the console. Kodiak’s documentation is sparse, which is not helped by it’s current apply-and-you-might-ever-get-allowed-to-the-beta program. But I hear positive comments when running it on Windows, so if you want to try Kodiak out, don’t wait and head over to their website to register yourself into the beta program.
BlueBear Kodiak 0.0.3 screenshot
One small reminder: if you want to connect to your VMware host (let it be ESX, ESXi or VMware Server 2), make sure you use the same server address as you currently use in your VMware Infrastructure Client: servername-or-ip:portnumber. It saves you the humiliation of running into error #2032, which actually means that AIR and Kodiak is not able to connect to your VMware environment.
And I want my console to work!
Update: Bluebear came out with 0.0.4 of their Kodiak management software, with some SSL modifications that would make working with self signed certificates much easier.
Windows clients forget their domain after you reset their snapshot?
Ever run into a problem where you revert a domain member server or Windows XP domain client toa previously taken snapshot, and when trying to log on the domain, the logon fails?
I did in 2007, and never really thought of it until I ran into the following article 1006764 on the VMWare knowledge base.
The cause is very simple, and so is the solution: Member servers and clients have, just like users, accounts with passwords. If set up like this, these passwords are reset every set period. If you revert a machine back to an old snapshot, chances are that the password stored in the snapshot is not up to date with the password stored in Active Directory, and hence, Active Directory does not allow the machine to log on again.
Problems running DHCP on VMWare ESX 3.0?
Last week, our team had a hard task solving an urgent problem on an VMWare ESX 3.0 we had running at one of our clients. For some unexplainable reason, the DHCP server running on one Microsoft Windows Server 2003 did not seem to work. On closer inspection, the service was still running on the server, but for some reason DHCP functionality was not reaching clients. …
