Archive for August, 2010

PCoIP VRAM Fix

Aug 30th

Posted by eeg3 in Virtualization

One of the biggest annoyances I’ve ran into when deploying VMware View is the finickiness of PCoIP. The problem is that if the video settings within your VM are not just right, then you will run into issues like:

  • You cannot re-size the screen
  • Resizing only works down instead of up.
  • Resizing responds very slowly or fails after several resize attempts.
  • You cannot switch between full-screen and windowed.

Obviously, these are rather deal-breaker bugs. To say the least, VMware’s response and fix to the issue are disappointing. Their “fix” involves jumping through a lot of hoops that make the process way more tedious than it should be. The KB article for this fix is 1018158.

It doesn’t appear that the vSphere client saves changes to the Video Settings fully to the .vmx file, but fortunately ermac318 over at VM Junkie has created a PowerCLI function to fix this issue. You can grab the script from his site or from a local mirror here. To run it, do the following:

> Connect-VIServer -server vCenterServer.tld

> . .\set-vramsize.ps1

> $vm = Get-VM -name VirtualMachineToModify

> Set-VRamSize($vm)

This should modify the .vmx file for the VM. You can confirm by downloading the .vmx file through vCenter and seeing if the file contains the expected modifications.

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Windows 2000 P2V Woes

Aug 29th

Posted by eeg3 in Virtualization

VMware has done a wonderful job making converting your existing infrastructure as painless as possible, but there are still issues that pop up every now and then. I find these issues occur much more often on Windows 2000 due to its age. We’ve ran into two issues recently on a couple of conversions of machines that now fall under our division’s management, and the worst part of these is that you only know about them after the conversion is done and you try to boot up your new VM. Fortunately, they are easy fixes:

VM boots with Blue Screen stating STOP 0x0000007B INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE

This occurs because the newly converted VM does not have the necessary drivers to boot, and it is an easy fix (KB Article: 1005208).

  1. Power on the source for the conversion. The source can be physical or virtual.
  2. Download the VMware SCSI Disk Controller driver diskette at http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmscsi-1.2.0.4.flp.
  3. Extract the disk image into files and copy them to the source.
  4. Attach the diskette to a virtual machine and copy the files from the virtual diskette drive to the physical source.
  5. Write contents of the image onto a floppy diskette and insert the diskette into the physical source. Image extraction software is required to do this.
  6. Access the floppy diskette or files on the source from My Computer.
  7. Right-click vmscsi.inf and click Install. The VMware SCSI drivers are installed.
  8. Restart the source to complete installation.
  9. Perform another conversion with VMware Converter

Converted machine fails to power on with the error: Stop:0X0000001 KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED

This is actually Microsoft’s fault. The resolution is covered in Microsoft’s KB 904374.

They provide the resolution on the basis that someone received this problem on their machine and then rebooted and now they can’t boot any longer. You can proceed with their instructions exactly, and repair the VM that you’ve already converted. Or, if you prefer an easier method, you can request the Hotfix download from Microsoft and install it on the Physical source then simply retry the conversion and it should work properly.

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