Just a quick tip for today – when I upgraded VMWare Workstation to 6.5.0 I found that any VM using NAT (network address translation) would cause my NAT service on the host to crash. I’m using Windows Vista as the host OS.

Well, it turns out that 6.5.1 fixed this. I upgraded, and now my VMs start without issue, and NAT is up and working.

I was trying an installation of a volume license edition of Windows XP Professional from MSDN disc 2430.2 (January 2007) to a new VMWare virtual machine. Our license key didn’t work though, despite use checking the key repeatedly, and trying every WinXP license key in the building.

In the end, on the advice of another developer, I started again with a new VM. I left the memory at 256Mb (my previous one was 1024Mb), removed the floppy, and previously I was running the ISO image from a CD, and this time I ran it from a hard disc. This worked. I don’t know which of these three factors was the relevant one, but if you’re doing an installation like that, I recommend trying those things.

I had an interesting problem over the weekend. I had been working on a VM several times last week. When I went to open it on Saturday, I got an error:

Could not open virtual machine: I:MOSS003 – OCT07 BaseWindows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition.vmx.

You do not have access rights to this file

Naturally, it struck me that a) I’m admin on my own machine, so privileges seems unlikely, and b) it had worked fine on Thursday. As I: is a USB hard disc, I copied the VM to my local drive, but the problem persisted.

I made sure that permissions were the same for this VM and others – they were.

I tried upgrading VMWare from 6.0.1 to 6.0.2, just on the off-chance – the problem persisted.

I was trying to open the VM by double clicking on the .vmx file. I tried opening the VM through the ‘file open’ dialog too – that didn’t work either. In fact, that caused VMWare to crash.

In the end, one of my colleagues suggested removing all spaces in the VMX file name (based on a post in VMWare’s community forums ) – and that fixed it. If I put the spaces back into the VMX file name – errors again. The really weird thing is, though, that I have plenty of other virtual machines with spaces in the file name, and they seem to work just fine. Further, why did it work and then it start to raise errors when the file names hadn’t changed?

Sounds like a bug. Something isn’t right there.

Oh, I’m using VMWare workstation for Windows 6.0.2 on Vista.

I’ve posted this to the VMWare community site here, but I’m blogging it too, as you have to log in to get the the VMWare site, and I don’t know if Google will pick it up.

1. Shutdown your VM.
2. Make a copy of the latest state (or the one you want to extend the disc for). You can’t keep snapshots across extending the disc.
3. Open command prompt, and go to “c:program filesvmwarevmware workstation”
4. Run the command vmware-vdiskmanager -x 10GB -t 1 “path_to_VMDK_file” . This will extend the virtual hard disc at the path defined to be a 10GB disc, stored as growable 2GB files.
5. Start the VM. Go to Disk Management, and you’ll see a bigger disk, now with a large unallocated space. You need to extend the partition into that space.
6. If it isn’t installed already, install DiskPart (which can be downloaded from Microsoft). This is a Microsoft tool, and is built into Windows 2003 Server. However, it works on 2000 and XP too.
7. Open a command line, and run DISKPART
8. Type list volume
9. From the list, identify the volume you want to extend (2 in my case)
10. Type select volume 2, where 2 is your volume from 9) above.
11. Type extend.
12. Job done.

Based on some instructions from here, but I think mine are simpler…

Some instructions here.

A tip from a colleague – to prevent VMs swapping memory to disk (to reduce the VM’s own footprint) add the falling line to the bottom of the VMX file.

mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"

I make no claims about it’s safety – but it did seem to stop the disk thrashing. That normally happened a bit – even when I had plenty of memory free.

Another tip I always forget – found here.

C:sc config beep start= disabled

Be sure to leave a space between the equals (=) sign and the word