It seems that VMware became aware that just about everyone has been logging into their ESXi boxes and enabling SSH access. So for the 4.1 release of ESXi, it is easy to enable the feature from within the vSphere client. Here's how.

This will be a quick post. I was searching for a way of implementing linked clones in Fusion, when I happened upon this posting. The crux of the post was "Does anybody know if something easier has been found for cloning VMW *Fusion*?"

I've got a pile of work to do with RSA coming up over the next six weeks. I'll be pretty much living and breathing the product in a project that will probably take me to Berlin, New York and London. It's an upgrade project so I thought I'd set up a sample environment and work through the process (yet again) as a bit of a practice. Any regular readers would know that I have fought with RSA 7.1 before. And I'm fighting it again today.

I signed an NDA, so I'm not telling you what's in the VCP 4 exam. Here are some quick hints though: read the blueprint. It's a great guide to the content of the exam (funnily enough!). And get this document bundle - most of the questions can be answered by knowing this documentation intimately.

The OVF Tool is included as part of the 'Full' sized Fusion 3.1 installer. I've recently written a brief article on how to make sure that it is installed for you when you first install Fusion. This article shows how to convert a virtual machine into an OVF template using this command line tool.

I have a template virtual machine created in Fusion that I'd like to share with a colleague. If this was an ESX virtual machine, I'd probably export it as an OVF file. In Fusion, it has been a tricky thing to do. Until now. Version 3.1 includes the OVF Tool if you know now to install it.

Yesterday, I upgraded to Fusion 3.1 on my MacBook. The upgrade was easy and painless. When I started up my Windows VM this morning, as expected VMware Tools began to automatically update itself.

When the vCentre Windows service starts, it tries to connect to its database. If the database is ready, then that's fine. If the database isn't properly started, then vCentre fails. Unfortunately,this is the usual case when you install the SQL database and vCentre on the same operating system. You reboot vCentre and it fails to start up automatically; you have to go and start the 'Virtual Center' service yourself. That's just rubbish.

On one of my recent courses a delegate noted that a full format doesn't inflate a thin disk. I've got an answer for him in this article. First, let's prove what he saw.

This article shows you how to clear the unused disk blocks inside a VMDK file in order to improve the efficiency of thin provisioning and virtual machine backups. We'll cover both Windows and Linux virtual machines. Before we get started on the 'how to' section, I think it's important to understand why we need to do this at all. What difference will this process make and why do you care?