As many of you will know I am an avid user of VMWARE Server for my endeavours on this blog. Like many I.T professionals I have been using VMWARE for as long as I can remember mainly for prototyping installations and performing “test lab” scenarios – therefore I have been impatiently awaiting the release of VMWARE Server 2.0 for a number reasons.
I do not intend to cover the feature set of VMWARE Server, nor do I intend to go over any of the new features in this article as it is beyond the scope of both the text and indeed this blog, but I would like to share a very simple solution to a problem that I encountered with my Exchange virtual machines after I had upgraded from VMWARE Server 1.0.6 to version 2.0.
Essentially the upgrade from 1.0.6 went very well, however after the installation had taken place and I logged onto the new web based management console and tried to start one of my Exchange Virtual Machines I encountered the following error:
Upon expanding the “Details” section of the dialog box revealed the following information:
The virtual machine would then fail to start.
I looked at the error message briefly and decided to open the folder one the disk which contains the virtual machine in question which looked like the following:
From reviewing the file list I could that there were a number of file with the file extension “LCK” (typically these are disk and configuration locking files) – I selected each of these files and deleted them.
After deleting each of the files the virtual machine then powered on correctly. I can only assume that by performing a physical upgrade of VMWARE 1.0.x to 2.0 does not cleanly reset each Virtual Machines lock status.
Hi Andy
I tried the new version of VMware, but to be honest I hate it – the browser functionaility seems clumsy and slow to me. I much prefer the release 1 interface – especially for a test lab, where I don’t really need off-host access to any of the VMs anyway.
Kevin
By: zbnet on October 10, 2008
at 7:45 am
Hey Kevin,
Hope all is well with you.
I have to admit that I kinda like it. I have not got any speed issues on the home rig, and I much prefer the web interface to that of the old Microsoft Virtual server.
Perhaps it is because that I use VMWARE Vi 3 with the Management centre in work a lot and the VMWARE server interface is very much a step closer to that interface.
I have yet to try Hyper-V – but I guess that I am so entrenched in the VMWARE camp it might be difficult at this stage to make a change.
A
By: Andy Grogan on October 11, 2008
at 8:09 pm