Virtualization

Forms with VBScript do not work with Terminal Services in Outlook

Ok so this is a known issue I encountered that I wanted to post about. I found a MS support article with a fix for this.

 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302003

So in situations where you are running Outlook on a TS(or Citrix) box, VBScript will not work and you will need to apply the fix in the article to get it working.

Citrix unveils Xen Desktop 4.0

You can check this out here:

 http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Virtualization/…

This is great and awesome and all that, nice job to Citrix for constantly updating their product but can they slow it down a little? I am going to be writing my cert for Xen Desktop 3 very shortly and now I haven’t even gotten the cert yet and it’s already out of date!

Microsoft Security Essentials - a review

Here is a great review for the new Microsoft Security Essentials products:

 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/30/…

In reading the review I was actually tentatively impressed ( I will save real positive feelings after i test it myself).

Microsoft unleashing a good product is rare enough but a good product that is free? I am pretty sure the planets must be aligning in just the right way for this to happen.

For those of you who are thinking to yourself “but HyperV is free” please note that in my previous statement I did say free AND good.

Running 16 bit applications in a 64 bit OS

So as many know Microsoft did not include any support for 16 bit applications in it’s 64 bit windows Operating Systems. What does this mean if you want to have a 64 bit OS but still need to run 16 bit applications? Well you have a couple of choices.

You could certainly use a product like VMware workstation or HyperV or such to run a virtual machine within your system that uses a guest OS that can run the software. This is a great solution but not a free solution.

If you are looking for a free solution I can recommend using an application called DosBox  http://www.dosbox.com/). This runs great inside my Vista 64 box and is completely free. I highly recommend it.

Setting up Websense on a Virtual machine

Ok so I was setting up a Websense VM in standalone mode and there are a few things that you need to do to make this work.

So, part of a Websense implementation includes setting up port spanning/mirroring on a port that connects to you monitor NIC so that it recieves all the traffic from your firewall. In ESX you will need to create a vSwitch for the Websense monitor network and allocate one of your physical NIC’s to to it which will plug into your mirror port on the switch.

The important step in creating this vSwitch is to go into the properties and enable it to act in promiscous mode, if you do not do this then your monitor vNic will not see any traffic.

After that just configure the second virtual NIC on your Websense VM to be a part of your Websense monitor network and Bob’s your uncle.

Unable to power on a VM: Corrupt Redo log

Here is a sample of the error that you will see.

Error message: msg.hbacommon.corruptredo:The redolog of dmz-obs-000002.vmdk has been detected to be corrupt. The virtual machine needs to be powered on. If the problem still persists, you need to discard the redolog.

You will not be able to power off or reset the VM. You need to kill it manually.

Here is how you do that:

Instructions on how to foracbly terminate a VM if it is unresponsive to the VI client.

In this you will be terminating the Master World and User Worlds for the VM which in turn will terminate the VM’s processes.

1. First list the running VMs to determine the VM ID for the affected VM:
#cat /proc/vmware/vm/*/names

vmid=1076 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/50823edc-d9110dd9-8994-9ee0ad055a68/vc using sql/vc using sql.vmx” uuid=”50 28 4e 99 3d 2b 8d a0-a4 c0 87 c9 8a 60 d2 31″ displayName=”vc using sql-192.168.1.10″

vmid=1093 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/50823edc-d9110dd9-8994-9ee0ad055a68/esx_template/esx_template.vmx” uuid=”50 11 7a fc bd ec 0f f4-cb 30 32 a5 c0 3a 01 09″ displayName=”esx_template”

The displayname will be the name of your VM as it appears in the GUI

For this example we will terminate the VM at vmid=’1605′

2. We need to find the Master World ID, do this type:
# less -S /proc/vmware/vm/1605/cpu/status

Replace the number in this command with your vmid from above.

Expand the terminal or scroll until you can see the right-most column. This is labelled ‘group’. Unterneath the column you will find: vm.1604

In this example ‘1604′ is the ID of the Master World.

3. Run this command to terminate the Master World and the VM running in it:

/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmkload_app –kill 9 1604

4. This should kill all the VM’s User Worlds and also the VM’s processes.

If Successful you will see similar:

Warning: Jul 12 07:24:06.303: Sending signal ‘9′ to world 1604.

You should then be able to work with your VM again

Force Xenapp Uninstall

So to uninstall Citrix you have to have the Citrix IMA service running properly. Which of course begs the question of what you do when you are trying to uninstall because the IMA service ISN’T working properly in the first case?

Open command prompt, navigate to the directory that has the Xenapp install MSI and use the command

msiexec /x mps.msi CTX_MF_FORCE_SUBSYSTEM_UNINSTALL=Yes

That will take care of the issue for you and force an uninstall

Shutdown a frozen VM

I was assisting a peer of mine with this issue. He had a VM where the guest OS froze. He attempted to shut off the VM but that also froze at 95%. He was then unable to do anything with the VM. We did some searching and found a way to force the VM offline from the command line which allowed us to then power the VM back on and everythign was fine.

Here is the link:

 http://www.vmware.com/support/esx21/doc/…

Changing userid and password for DSN in Citrix XenApp

If you need to change the userid and password that control the DSN access for Xenapp here is what you  need to do.

From command prompt on the citrix server (you will need to do this from each one)

dsmaint config /userid:*username* /pwd:*password* /dsn:”C:\program files\citrix\idependent management architecture\mf20.dsn”

Restart the citrix IMA service

Citrix client Auto deploy not working

I had trouble with this today. Make sure that when you copy the contents of the client folder from the installation media into the Citrix\Webinterface\*version number\clients folder, you keep the exact file structure the same. Also just sopy the contents of the client folder, not the whole folder itself