vSphere 4 client installation error 1603

VMware October 14th, 2009

Tried to install a vSphere 4 Client on a vanilla Windows 2003 server today.

Framework Error 1603

Great! Took me a few minutes to figure out what happened. VMware included *only* the online framework installer and not the full offline version. As my testlab is not connected to the net it fails. Kudos to Microsoft for the creative error code (1603 is “general failure” – how nice would it be if the installer would just say “Sorry, can’t connect to ….”)

So how do we fix this?  Just download the offline Framework installer and install it. Afterwards the vSphere client installs without any issues. Click here for the VMware KB article.

Tags: , ,

No Comments

Sun Virtualbox – How to shrink your VDI files

VirtualBox, Virtualisation September 27th, 2009

Shrinking sparse hard disk images in VMware is easy. Sun’s VirtualBox requires a little bit more work.

  1. Power up the VM and defragment the disk.
  2. If you plan to compress the machine afterwards fill it’s hard disk with zeros  (nullfile works quite well – you can download it from here)
  3. Power the VM down.
  4. Open a cmd on the host machine and change into the VirtualBox install directory
  5. Execute VBoxManage modifyvdi path_to_your_vdi_file compact

This will take a while!

Tags: , ,

No Comments

VMXNET vs. e1000

VMware June 8th, 2009

Just came across this very interesting document from VMware around (para-)virtualised network adapters.

www.vmware.com/files/pdf/perf_comparison_virtual_network_devices_wp.pdf

One-line conclusion: If your CPU supports hardware virtualisation use VMXNET.

Tags:

No Comments

Install VMware Tools on debian 5.0 (lenny)

Linux, VMware May 31st, 2009

Install the developement environment, we will need gcc and the kernel headers so

apt-get install build-essential
apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)

Unpack the VMware tools into a local directory and launch vmware-install.pl

./vmware-install.pl

When running vmware-configure.pl, I first got an error stating that the kernel was built using gcc 4.1.3, but the system was configured to use gcc 4.3.2

Using 2.6.x kernel build system.
make: Entering directory `/tmp/vmware-config2/vmxnet-only’
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.26-2-686/build/include/.. SUBDIRS=$PWD SRCROOT=$PWD/. modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.26-2-686′
/tmp/vmware-config2/vmxnet-only/Makefile:106: *** Inappropriate build environment: you wanted to use gcc version 4.3.2 while kernel attempts to use gcc version 4.1.3.
/tmp/vmware-config2/vmxnet-only/Makefile:108: *** For proper build you’ll have to replace gcc-4.1 with symbolic link to /usr/bin/gcc. Stop.
make[1]: *** [_module_/tmp/vmware-config2/vmxnet-only] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.26-2-686′
make: *** [vmxnet.ko] Error 2
make: Leaving directory `/tmp/vmware-config2/vmxnet-only’
Unable to build the vmxnet module.

As the vmware installer honours the environment variable CC we can simply fix this by doing an

export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.1

and re-run vmware-installer.pl

Tags: ,

No Comments