Category Archives: VMware

How to speed up the vSphere 4 Client

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Lately I’ve found that the my vSphere Client has been really slow.

It turned out that deleting the following 2 registry keys does the trick:

HKCU\Software\VMware\Virtual Infrastructure Client

HKCU\Software\VMware\VMware Infrastructure Client

Check out the original post here:

Apparently, all the prior versions and settings get retained during updates / upgrades and seem to cause significant delays due to components referenced that no longer exist.

Update 2011-04-21:

I also found this guide that shows you how to disable some Aero features that’s slowing down the client on Windows 7. Here is a link to the VMware KB.

This issue occurs when desktop composition is enabled.
To workaround this issue, disable desktop composition:
  1. Right-click the shortcut for the vSphere Client and click Properties.
  2. Click the Compatibility tab.
  3. Select Disable desktop composition.Note: This disables Aero desktop effects while the application is open.
  4. Click OK.
  5. Run the vSphere Client.

Aligning VM Partitions Without Losing Data

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If you align your virtual disks the performance of your VM:s increases. The only problem is when you have a n already installed VM that doesn’t have aligned disks.

Do you really want to create a new VM with aligned disks and then install the OS, VMware tools, applications etc?

I found a great guide on how to align partitions without losing data on tuxyturvy.com.

It basically boils down to the following:

1.  Make sure the disk is defragmented
2.  Boot the system with the Gparted live CD.
3.  Select the parition you are wanting to resize and choose (Move/Resize)
4.  Shrink the volume by some amount, the smaller you shrink it the faster it will copy during the move step.  I usually shrink it a GB or so larger than the amount of data on the drive.
5.  Move the partition to right by a few MB’s to free up space at the start of the disk.
6.  Once the move completes, exit Gparted, not the entire live CD, just the Gparted application
7.  Start the terminal window on the live CD
8.  In the command window type ‘parted /dev/sda’ (substitute your actual device here) to start the command line parted editor
9.  Create a new partition at the start of the disk to fill in the space up to the section where you want to align your parition.  For example, if you want your system partition to start at sector 128, create a very small partition that takes up space from sectors 63-127.  The command would be something like this:

mkpart primary 63s 127s

This tells parted to create a new primary partition from sector 63 to sector 127.  That means the very next sector available is 128, a stripe aligned partition.  You may want a different start sector based on your array (some use 64K, some 128K, some bigger) but I’ve found the 128K alignment to work well with both 64K (Equallogic) and 128K (EMC Clariiion) stripe sizes.

10.  Exit parted and restart the Gparted GUI by clicking the Gparted icon.
11.  Use the Move/Resize option to resize the NTFS partition to fill the entire remaining space.  As pointed out by several users, you MUST uncheck the “Round to Cylinders” option prior to this.  I guess I thought this was obvious since we’re trying to align to a specific sector but that’s why I’m not a documentation writer.
12.  Exit gparted, run parted again, remove the small partition you created earlier and reboot.

How to backup vCenter running SQL Express

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I found a great way to backup the vCenter SQL database running on SQL Express. The downside of running vCenter on SQL Express is the lack of the SQL agent. So running a scheduled backup of the SQL database is a bit tricky.

ExpressMaint is a small application set of scripts/stored procedures that enables you to run backup and maintenance jobs from commandline.(You could run the application ExpressMaint as well, but I installed the stored procedure version.)

I installed and configured it by doing the following:

  1. I created c:\backups to store my backups
  2. I downloaded the ExpressMaint TSQL file.
  3. I opened a new cmd.exe (with administrative rights) and installed the Stored Procedure by running:
    sqlcmd -S .\SQLEXP_VIM -i c:\expressmaint.sql
  4. I created c:\backups\database to store my database backups
  5. I created c:\backups\reports to store my reports
  6. I created c:\backups\backupscript.sql (SQL file that contains the backup settings, note that my script performs the backup and rebuilds the indexes on the vCenter database):
    exec expressmaint
    @database = 'ALL_USER',
    @optype = 'DB',
    @backupfldr = 'c:\backups\databases',
    @reportfldr = 'c:\backups\reports',
    @verify = 1,
    @dbretainunit = 'days',
    @dbretainval = 5,
    @rptretainunit = 'weeks',
    @rptretainval = 1,
    @report = 1
    exec expressmaint
    @database = 'VIM_VCDB',
    @optype = 'REINDEX',
    @reportfldr = 'c:\backups\reports',
    @rptretainunit = 'days',
    @rptretainval = 1,
    @report = 1
  7. I created c:\backups\PerformBackup.cmd (this is the batch script that executes the backup):
    sqlcmd -S .\SQLEXP_VIM -i c:\backups\backupscript.sql
  8. I schedule c:\backups\PerformBackup.cmd using the ordinary Windows scheduled task manager.

Replacing blurry windows icons in VMware Fusion.

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One of the first things that I noticed after installing VMware Fusion was that the Windows icons look awful compared too the native Mac OS X ones..

But there is a way to fix this.

The solution is to download better looking icons and replace the default ones.

These will be located inside the .vmwarevm file of the relevant virtual machine. Typically, the .vmwarevm file is located in: ~/Documents/Virtual Machines. For those with a Bootcamp partition, you can find the .vmwarevm file in: ~/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/Virtual Machines/Boot Camp/Boot Camp partition.vmwarevm.

Ctrl-click (right-click) this file and select “Show Package Contents.” Go to the Applications folder and you should see a list of Windows applications.

Select the application which icon you would like to replace and choose Get Info (Command-i or File » Get Info). The window that pops up should have an icon in the top left; this is the icon that you will replace.

Here are some alternative icons:

Benjigarner and TpdkDesign.net

References

http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2008/06/replacing-those.html