VMware View 3.1 / Kaspersky Problem

There appears to be an incompatibilty between Kaspersky's latest version and VMware View 3.1

For the time being Geoff's removed Kaspersky from the VDI machines and disabled the USB sticks so that people can't introduce viruses.

Obviously we're looking for a long-term solution - I will post an update when I know more

Update 18/4/2010 - This problem has now gone away. My guess is that either Kaspersky or Microsoft have sorted it, but we can't find any reference to it.

Cannot Uninstall VMWare View Agent

This is the second time I've come across this poor uninstaller that seems to want the original MSI file before it will uninstall itself.

I just go into the registry and delete all references to VMware View.

VMware View 3.1 - Provisoning Error - Can't Find Folder

Got this error this morning. It's because we recently completely reinstalled VirtualCenter when upgrading ESX because it wouldn't take the upgrade.

The problem was that this got rid of the "folders" which the old sets of virtual desktops were in - existing desktops were OK but new ones wouldn't provision.

I found a VMware KB article on this - apparently it's a known bug and "might" be fixed at some point in the future. For this time being, the only option left is to create a new pool of desktops from the same template and move the users over from the old to the new. Then you can delete the old.

Fileserver Kept Crashing

One of our servers kept crashing yesterday - well not crashing actually but stopping serving files and then (perhaps) starting again a random number of minutes yesterday.

A reboot would solve the problem temporarily.

Pulled the server down last night and scanned the data volume thinking it might be corruption (have seen it before). The scan started and then stalled - utilisation figures were good for a few hours then went to zero.

I created a new server and mapped the disk (it's on a SAN) to the new one and it seems to be OK - so it might have been the server, not the disk, but I still suspect the disk and will transfer the data to a new drive over the Christmas shutdown.

Dotnet Runtime Compiler Error

Had a problem with the dotnet compiler at runtime today (VS2005 / VB). The compiler would build OK but then give a runtime error before the startup form opening telling me the index was out of bounds. No more help and it wasn't anything in our code.

Fixed by making a modification to the startup form and rebuilding. This seems to make the compiler rebuild the underlying code and get rid of whatever error it had managed to introduce.

The problem seems to have been caused by a compiler crash earlier in the day.

DotNet io.directory.delete fails with permissions error

Interesting one today - dotnet io.directory.delete failed with a permissions error. It turns out that the folder you're deleting and the files contained within must NOT be read-only.

Fixed by iterating through all the folders/files and setting permissions to normal.

MIS System Crashing - Date Error

Interesting error today - have seen this one before.

The MIS system would crash on startup, but only for a specific user and when I tried it myself it was fine.

It transpired that the computer was set to English (US) and so the dates were presenting in MM/DD rather than DD/MM. Since some dates are (historically) saved as text not as date format, it couldn't interpret them and crashed. We should, of course, change the system to save all dates properly, but the quick solution is to reset the user to English (UK).

IBM Blades Not Booting from Internal HDD

We had a problem tonight with some blades not booting from their internal HHDs. It turns out that in order to boot from internal HDD you need to disable the planar daughter card slot one to free up the IRQ for the HDD to boot.

When configuring ESX (or whatever OS) you need to enable the card for the HBA utility to be accessed (but disable it again after the config)

Isn't life fun :-)

UPDATE: Doing this allows it to boot but then it can't see the SAN LUNs!! Ooops.

UPDATE: To fix this just reset the HBA BIOS to factory settings, even though they look identical to working ones.

Exchange 2007 log files

Exchange 2007 doesn't seem to clear old log files automatically. I have had to use a third party package to manually remove the old ones.

There's probably some option somewhere, but I can't imagine where.

Nick

DS4700 / ESX Woes

We're still having the problem where VMFS volumes mysteriously corrupt or files lock rendering the virutal machine useless. We're going to try three things:

1) restarting all ESX servers to see if the locks clear
2) remove the IBM DS4700 live mirroring to see if that's the cause
3) re-zone the SAN to halve the infrastructure available to each ESX server

Nick

First Post

Welcome to my blog. In here I'll be storing "wisdom" discovered in my day to day IT job

Nick