VMWare Server 2.0 Troubleshooting

Yesterday, my VMWare Server stops working. It did not give me the login screen - so I thought maybe I just need to restart the host agent service under Services. I wrote a post about this here.

So I went to Services, found that the host agent is stopped and I restarted it. Then I got this error:



Aaaarrrrgggh!!! So anyway - I went around, googled it, read the logs, etc etc, and resolved it.

In my case the error was cause by a malformed XML file for VMWare configuration. The XML in my Win XP host is located at "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware Server\hostd".

I am guessing that when I installed VMWare, I probably chose "allow all users to use it" - and if you picked "allow only me", the xml files probably will reside under your username instead of under "all users".

So what I did was just opening the XML file one by one with an XML editor (I used Visual Studio) until I found the culprit XML file - which in my case was the datastores.xml - then fixed the tags and save.

Then via Services, I restarted the host agent service.


Voila! It works!
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How to Increase/Enlarge Hard Drive Space in a VM

Cannot enlarge hard drive space?

First of al, to enlarge your hard drive space, you will need to turn off the VM. Highlight your VM and under disk, click EDIT and there should be a link to enlarge your drive space. This option will be disabled if you have taken snapshots of your VM. So in this case, delete/collapse the snapshots and then enlarge the drive space.

If you breaking your VM into 2GB chunks, you will need to do it from the command line.

The command line to do it is this:
vmware-vdiskmanager

The full syntax is this (assuming you want to increase it to 10GB and your disk filename is myDisk.vmdk located in F:/VMs/MyVm/):
vmware-vdiskmanager -x 10GB "F:/VMs/MyVM/myDisk.vmdk"

You will need to run the command from VMWare directory - in VMWare Server 2.0, the directory is located at "C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Server". So open a command prompt, navigate to the VMWare dir and execute the command above.

The command will run for a while and after it is done, it will give you a message indicating whether the expansion is successful or not.

Now once the diskspace is increased, you will need to expand the file system to its max capacity. Running the command above or through the VMWare interface only increase the max capacity of the disk, but the size of the allocated size used by the VM is still at the old size. There are several ways to do this:
1. Mount your VMDK file to you host machine using vmware-vdiskmount and then expand it using DISKPART from your host OS (vmware-vdiskmount is only available for VMWare Infrastructure & Workstation). I think you can download it from here but I have never tried to use it with VMWare Server - so try at your own risk.

2. Mount your VMDK to another VM (it has to be the same harddrive controller - SCSI/IDE) and then expand it using DISKPART from your second VM. To mount the VMDK into your second VM, follow these steps: a) Make sure both VMs are shut down b) Highlight/Focus on your second VM and click "Add Hardware" under "Commands" box, select "Hard Disk", then select "Use an Existing Virtual Disk". Browse to your first VM VMDK file and make sure the type is the same as your expanded VM under "Virtual Device Node". c) After completing the wizard, you should see the mounted drive under Hard Disk within your hardware list. d) Start your second VM e) Run DISKPART.

3. You can also use 3rd party tools such as Partition Magic or other similar tools.


Related Posts:
VMWare Server Experience
Win XP 64 bit and VMWare Server
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XP 64 and VMWare Server

With Windows XP 64 bit Edition, I wanted to install VMWare Server 2.0 - the installation failed. It will do all the installation preparation and then close itself without installing anything.

Googling it around using keywords like "XP64 VMWare Server" did not yield any meaningful results (at least not in the first 4 pages or so). I almost thought that XP 64 is not compatible with VMWare Server 2.0 - but the readme says it should be OK.

After asking around, my boss at work told me that there is patch/hotfix from Microsoft that I need to install to get this working. The patch is about multiple processors and virtualization that requires processor management.

There is a KB article about this: KB896256 and you can download the patch from there.

If you are running AMD processors, you also want to apply this hotfix & drivers from AMD.
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VM Ware Server 2.0 Experience

I have been doing a lot of virtualization in the past 2 months or so. The engine of choice so far is VM Ware. Microsoft also has a virtualization engine called Virtual PC - I have never used it, but a lot of people that I know use VM Ware, so basically I just follow suit. Maybe when I have a chance to play around with Virtual PC, I will write a blog post comparing them against each other.

What I want to highlight in this post is some of the tips and tricks that got mine to work as I needed. Your needs may differ, but hopefully some of these are generic enough that they can still be helpful.

VM Ware Server site: http://www.vmware.com/products/server/

When you click download, you will need to fill in a form to get your key. It is free, so go ahead and fill in the form and the instruction to get the key will be emailed to you. Once you get the downloaded file, run it to execute the installation procedure.

Installation is pretty straight forward - just follow the instruction provided by the installer. At some point, you will be required to enter a license key - this is the key you got from the registration process.

Once the installation is done, usually it will create a shortcut on your desktop called "VMWare Server Home Page". This is the main executable that will launch the interface for VMWare Infrastructure interface. When you run it (by double clicking it), it will open a browser (whatever browser set to be the default) and there are 3 things that you will typically see.

1. There is a problem with this website's security certificate.
If you get this screen/page, all you need to do is to click on the second link on the page that says "Continue to this website (not recommended). "
Then on the next screen you will get a login screen. This is a login to the VMWare Infrastructure interface - you can login using the username and password that you use to login to the computer. So if you login to the computer using "myname" and with password "mypassword", then you use the same username & password to login to this VMWare web interface.
If your machine is in the domain, you do not need to include your domain name in the login process. So instead of login with DOMAIN\username, just use "username".






2. Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage.
If you get this screen when you open the VMWare Server Home Page, I will check several things: a) Is the URL correct? b) Is the port number correct? c) Is VMWare Host Agent service running? You can check this in "Services", located in Administrator Tools under Control Panel. If this service does not exist, you will need to reinstall VMWare Server. If it is there and not running, you need to start it. Once it is started, close all browser with VMWare stuff in it, and try again.
Also keep in mind, in FireFox or other browsers, it may look different.

3. VM Ware also has this tool that's called VM Ware Converter 3.0. This is a very useful tool to convert your physical PC into a VM or vice versa. It also allows you tp change the configuration of your VM by cloning it. The free version has limited functionality, but it should be able to do the things I mentioned above. The paid version has more robust functionality.

Related Posts:
How to Increase HD Space in a VM
Win XP 64 bit and VMWare Server
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