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Xtravirt produced a solid How-to on installing ESX 4i on  VMware Workstation 6.5.2.  Requires registration and login.

This white paper outlines the process of installing ESXi 4.0 in Workstation 6.5.2 as a VM. Being able to run VMware ESXi 4.0 as a VM under VMware Workstation gives users and professionals in the IT community great flexibility when it comes to learning, experimenting or even demonstrating the product, however this is not an officially supported deployment.

The approach is fundamentally no different to VMware ESXi 3.5, the main difference simply being the change in minimum hardware requirements for the virtual machine and parts of the actual installation of ESXi 4.0 itself.

How to Install VMware ESXi 4.0 on Workstation 6.5.2 as a VM | Xtravirt

After a long hiatus from blogging (see having a kid) I plan on posting regularly to p2vd.com.  With a ton of new products and transformations in the virtual space, this definitely is a great time to jump back in!

While searching for some information on VMware, I found this solid concise reference card on VI3

http://www.vmreference.com/downloads/vmreferenceVI3card1.3for3.5U3.pdf

I’m trying to make my way back to blogging.  Having a kid seems to have taken away more free time then I expected!  Taking another stab at it since I am going to (hopefully) start playing with vSphere very soon.

My real job (not p2vd.com) is looking for some rockstars for the following positions:

Senior Active Directory Engineer

Windows Engineering with focus on Monitoring

Team Lead – Database Engineering

Microsoft SQL Database Administrator

Project Manager – IT Services

Knowledge Management Analyst

Desktop Support Engineer

Telecommunications Engineer

Senior Network Trading Engineer

IT Service Desk Analyst

IT Infrastructure Support Engineer – NYC

If anyone lives in the Chicagoland area and is interested in these positions, please ping me and I will provide additional details.

If you have deployed VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2, please read below.  If you have this in production, I would still test the patch below before applying.  You never know if this patch will uncover something new…

Special Notice: Please Read

An issue has been uncovered with ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 that causes the product license to expire on August 12, 2008. Follow the steps below to correct this issue:

1. Read the following Knowledge Base articles first:
   • Fix of virtual machine power on failure issue, refer to KB 1006716
   • For VI 3.5, refer to KB 1006721 for deployment consideration and instruction
   • For VI3.5i, refer to KB 1006670 for deployment consideration and instruction
2. Download and apply the patch according to the product(s) you have:
   VMware ESXi 3.5 Update 2 Patch | VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2 Patch | Search All Patches

How sweet is this!  Not only has VMware released cmdlets for automating VI3 tasks, they are ponying up some sweet digs for the best powershell scripts!

ENTER THE CONTEST!

UPDATE!!!

You should start to see some new posts and how-to’s coming soon, since my son has finally started sleeping thru the night

Sorry for the delay….

Hopefully you were not one of the VMware customers that implemented this update in production before testing.  If you did, please let us know what you’re seeing and what your workarounds are for this bug.

This morning the VMware’s customers that upgraded their virtual data centers with the new Infrastructure 3.5 Update 2 (build 103908) had an awful surprise: any virtual machine that is turned off cannot be powered on again, and any attempt to execute a VMotion (the live migration of a VM from one host to another) fails.

The reason behind this huge and unprecedented issue is an error in the license expiration time.

The only way to workaround the problem at the moment is to disable the Network Time Protocol (NTP) client and set the date back to August 10, as promptly suggested by a customer here.

Of course this countermeasure has an impact on the log consistency and on any tool that analyzes the VirtualCenter events for different purposes (performance monitoring, trend analysis, capacity planning calculation, etc.).

More than that obviously, this issue has an impact on the availability of those infrastructures where the IT administrators are in vacation (and there are many on August 12) and cannot operate any recovery.

The users from all around the world are reporting failures of part of their systems and in some case even the complete knock-down.

VMware has over 200,000 enterprise customers (100% of Fortune 100 and 95% of Fortune 500), and it claimed that 59% of them use VMotion in production.
The company didn’t provide any statistics about how many already deployed the Update 2, but the license fault could have impacted thousands of them.

VMware is aware of the issue but couldn’t provide any immediate solution.
At the moment it seems that the entire VMware Knowledge Base collapsed.
Calling the support line customers can just receive a brief message saying that the problem will be solved within 36 hours.
Additionally, VMware removed the capability to download any affected product.

A VMware mistake may shutdown thousands of virtual infrastructures | virtualization.info

Sorry about the lack of posting over the past couple months.  What I call the perfect storm has hit.  We have sold our home, moved in with in-laws, are buying a home, and just had our first kid.  As you can tell from that list, my blogging time has been limited  

I will be blogging again soon, along with possibly writing for another site. 

Cheers,

Ryan