Showing installed app versions with BgInfo

I love it when you can use one cool tool to enhance another cool tool.  Duncan Epping posted an English translation of a Arne Fokkema post about how to use BgInfo to display the version number of VMware Tools that has been installed inside a VMWare virtual machine.

If you have never used BgInfo, it's a great little utility written by Bryce Cogswell of Sysinternals fame.  BgInfo will write a desktop bitmap that will contain useful information about the machine: machine name, ip address, version stuff, free space, etc.  You can set BgInfo to run when you login by placing a shortcut to it in the user's or shared startup folder.

When you work with multiple servers, real or virtual, their desktops all tend to look alike.  BgInfo makes it easy to see at glance which machine you are currently connected to.

What Arne wrote about was that in addition to displaying predefined variable, BgInfo can display version information from any file that has version information.  You point BgInfo to the location of the VMWareServer executable and select version formation and you are done.  The screen shot from Arne's blog shows how simple it is:

BgInfo is very handy for displaying static information.  Since the desktop background is only being rendered when you login in, you wouldn't want to use it to display a dynamic variable, like CPU load.  I can see where you would use this to display other version type of information.  If you are testing against multiple service pack versions of SQL Server, you could display that information.   While I've been talking about using this for a VMware virtual image, this is handy for Virtual PC images or any server that you would remote in to.

Two of my favorite geek toys (PowerShell and VMWare) playing together

I can't wait to get the VI Toolkit for Windows.  It's PowerShell cmdlets that let you manage VMWare.  To get an idea of what you can do with PowerShell and ESX Server, check out the Automating VMware with PowerShell Lab Manual, from the VMworld Europe 2008 conference.  You will be able monitor the status of VM's on the ESX server and be able to control the VM's remotely.  I'm curious to see of you would be able to take a running VM offline and move it to a storage volume.  That would make my life easier.

The VI PowerShell Blog mentioned that the VI Toolkit will be Beta this month, I can't wait to get a hold of it.

Fun with changing the IP address of ESX Server 3.5

We (our IT manager and myself) have been having some fun with out shiny new VMWare ESX 3.5 server.  We have had it running for about two weeks now and we decided to change it's IP address.  The ESX server was on the same subnet as our LAN.  This meant that it the virtual machines were taking IP addresses out of a pool that was needed for our physical computers.  There were some other security issues, so we decided to put it on it's own subnet.

It was fairly easy to change the IP address address via the command line (this site helped a lot), the fun started with the NFS connection.  We are using NFS to mount a folder located on a Windows file server to add some offline storage for the ESX box.  To mount with NFS, you have to create a VMKernel in the ESX networking and the VMKernel gets it's own IP address.  That IP address must be on the same subnet as the NFS server.

When we moved the ESX to it's own subnet, we put it on it's own physical network and that broke the NFS connection.  We tried a few things and then we checked the Windows box that was running the NFS server.  It had two network cards.  The second one was not enabled, but fully functional.  We enabled it and set it's IP address to the subnet of the ESX box.  I had to drop and recreate the NFS mount, but it all worked.

While testing the networking, the IT manager was running one of the virtual machines (XP 64-bit) and set the network adapter in the VM to a static IP address.   It turned out he set it to the IP address of the ESX server.  That's when the fun started.  When you connected to the VM, ESX would lose it's connection and you lost control over ESX and the VM.  After a minute or two, you could access ESX through the VMWare Infrastructure Client, but you couldn't access the VM to change it's IP address.

We racked our brains trying to figure out how to get control of the VM to reset it's IP address.  The fix turned out to be really simple.  I powered down the VM from VIC and edited it's hardware settings.  I added a second network adapter (it's all virtual) and set the first one to be disconnected.  I powered the VM back up and the new adapter had a safe IP address.  I connected to the VM's console and opened up "Network Connections" in Windows.  The first adapter was enabled, but not connected.  I opened up it's properties and set it to grab an IP through DHCP.

I powered down the VM, removed the second adapter, and reconnected the first one.  I rebooted the VM and it had a new IP address.  Peace and harmony reigned through my virtual kingdom.

VMware-authd.exe slowing down my PC

I was doing some work on one of my PC's and I had the processes list open in Task Manager. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that one process, VMware-authd.exe, was going from 0 to 10% of the CPU. I didn't know what that process did, I went out on a limb and assumed that it was somehow related to VMWare. VMware is one of my favorite tools, but I wasn't running any VMWare sessions. Time to go Googling. Apparently it's a service that provides administrator priviledges to to a running VMWare session if the host use isn't logged in with administrator access rights

If you are logged in with admin rights, you don't need to have this service running. VMware-authd.exe is the name of the executable for the "VMware Authorization Service" service. You can go into Services and shut that service down and then set it's startup type to "manual". There are no other services that depend on that service to be running. You can also stop the service from the Windows command line with the following:

net stop VMAuthdService

[Edited on 3/5/08]

If you need to restart the service from the command line, use the following:

net start VMAuthdService