Mount a VMware .vmdk File

After years of using VMware products, I still stumble over features and utilities all the time. Here’s my latest discovery.

I hate to risk losing data or configurations so before I retire a server I convert it to a virtual machine. The same with employee PCs. When someone leaves, I convert it to a VM before

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Upgraded to VMware ESXi

This week I had the pleasure of advancing my “virtualization program” at work. I also got a chance to install and configure my first “real” production VMware ESXi 4.0 server. Not my first, but the first one that isn’t educational and will really get used at the office.

ESXi is what is called a “bare metal

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Sysinternals Disk2vhd Announced

The Sysinternals folks today announced a new utility called Disk2vhd. As you might guess from the name, it creates a virtual hard drive from a running machine.

So, just as you could use VMware vCenter Converter to create VMware images of live machines, you can now do the same for Microsoft’s Hyper-V or Virtual PC.

Some interesting

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Windows Error Event ID: 1054 (Solved)

I needed to put a new domain controller up at one of our production sites this week. We had an older web server in the dev environment that doesn’t get much use these days so I converted it to a virtual machine (I love VMware Converter!) and then reloaded it with Windows 2003 R2.

The install

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VMware Converter Doesn’t Like x64?

I’m having a heck of a time with VMware Converter on my Windows 2003 x64 VMware Server machine. Before I built this particular x64 box, I used to run Converter all the time on a 32bit server with no issues. But for some reason, it gets wonky on the new one.

Heck, I even upgraded to

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