VMWare - Never expand a disk with a snapshot running

You should never expand a virtual disk while snapshots are active.

In ESX3.5, although it will allow you to expand a virtual disk with snapshot and VC will report that the tasks completed successfully, but in truth the disk not actually expand.

It's worst if you expand disk with vmkfstools while snapshot active, the VM will no longer start and you will receive an error: "Cannot open the disk ".vmdk" or one of the snapshot disks it depends on. Reason: The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created." Fortunately there is a way to recover from this scenario, it is detailed in the VMworld 2007 presentation IO44: Top support issues and how to solve them – Batch 2.

ESX ssh root login

ESX ssh root login was disabled by default, to enable it:

1. Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config file.

2. Edit line "Permit RootLogin" to yes.


3. Restart ssh service.
- service sshd restart

Configure sudo on ESX

1. edit /etc/sudoers

2. add user under #User privilege specification

example:
# User privilege specification
root ALL=(ALL) ALL
abcd ALL=(ALL) ALL

Error 0x80190194 when using an Outlook 2007 client to download a Web Distribution enabled OAB

If you'are in mutiple domain site, OAB may not works after migration to Exchange 2007.

Here the fix.

1. Identify Exchange server which have OAB working fine and locate D:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\ClientAccess\OAB, looks for , something similar like this
96803b99-72ba-7b38-8a2d-6883f0f1b6d9

2. Copy the to the Exchange server D:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\ClientAccess\OAB that has OAB problem.

3. Assign READ access to Authenticated Users.

Now it should works.

KMS - Key Management Server

Where to look for your KMS DNS record and identify your KMS hostname.

KMS requires minimum number of computers (physical or VM) in a network environments. At least 5 Windows Server 2008 R2 and 25 Windows 7 clients are needed. These minimums are referred to as activation threshold.