Category: VMware

Windows 7, Fully Functional …

Well at this point I have pretty much managed to get everything working on Windows 7 Professional, 64-bit.  The last piece of the puzzle was getting a working VPN connection.  Although I was not able to get my NetGear client to work, or their SSL connection to work, there is a VPN client called Shrew Soft VPN Client that works quite well with the router that we are using.  I have tested it with a FVS336G and a FVX538.  Now to take some time and get it working with my home network.

The other item that was outstanding on the get working list was the VI Client for vSphere 4.  When trying to connect to the server I was getting the message “Error parsing the server <server name> “clients.xml” file.”  There was a good workaround here.

After getting there last two items corrected, I have to say that I couldn’t be happier with the performance and stability of Windows 7.

VMware ESX 3.0

After running VMware Server for about two months at work we managed to display the advantages of using VMware, which convinced management to allow us to purchase VMware ESX and install it on one of the primary servers. Since we started running VMware Server we have stopped having the weekly problems with the Domain Controller going down at night and slowing the other production server to a crawl. We installed ESX about a month ago now, and it has been worth every penny. It has allowed us to separate all the services and applications that were running on the two servers. The ESX server is currently hosting 4 Windows 2003 Servers, 2 Windows XP boxes, 1 Netware Server and a Ubuntu Server. Most of the time when I check to see how the server is running it is only at 25% utilization. We purchased the VMware Infrastructure Starter package which only supports local SCSI drives and NAS. It does not support SANs or iSCSI, but we do not need any of these options. The only real problem I have found is that the Virtual Infrastructure Client used to manage the server is designed on the .NET framework and only runs under Windows. It is not the best solution, but right now I am running the VI Client in a vm running on VMware Workstation on my Ubuntu notebook. There is a web based console for it, however it is not as full featured as the VI Client. All in all I would have to say that I would recommend this to anyone looking to better utilize there resources.