Tuning Vmware Workstation 8 performance

In effort to squeeze a little bit more performance from my vSphere 5 whitebox, I tried to tune some settings of my VMware Workstation 8. Recently, I've found disk activity concerning .vmem files (From vmware.com: vmem is the virtual machine's paging file, which backs up the guest main memory on the host file system. This file exists only when the virtual machine is running, or if the virtual machine has crashed.). I don't think that I do need this files because I don't want suspend my virtual machines etc. I need pure performance, so I decided to tweak some Workstation settings. First of all find "config.ini" (In my Windows 7 it's located in "C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation") and add/modify the following parameters:

mainMem.useNamedFile = "no"  - tells not to use .vmem files

prefvmx.minVmMemPct = "100"  - fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM. Swapping won't be occurring so the host machine must have enough memory to accommodate  the sum of all memory reserved for every single virtual machine.


prefvmx.allVMMemoryLimit = "15000" - this parameter tells how much host memory can be used for the virtual machine memory allocation.

prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = "yes" - well, to be honest I don't really need what this parameter do, but I've seen suggestion to enable it :)

vCenter error while trying to delete NAS storage

Today I've faced another interesting problem. I've added the NFS storage to the ESXi host, then I've added the same storage to the cluster. After a while I've noticed that one of the hosts had 2 storages attached with different names, but pointing to the same NFS target. When I've tried to delete the wrong one, I've got the foloowing error: "The object has already been deleted or has not been completely created". To make the things even more complicated, the virtual machines that were vMotion'ed to that ESXi host in a cluster, somehow changed their datastores to the wrong one (like background Storage vMotion). Thanks God that was testing environment :).

However the solution is very simple:
Just restart the management agents on the ESXi host. This will force the update at the vCenter Server.

Nice PDF cropping tool

By using this tool you can easily crop pdf files to help them match the screen of your e-reader or smartphone http://www.pdfscissors.com/

Moving WSUS content and Windows Internal Database to another drive

Today I had to create a RAID massive from the disk, where WSUS content was stored. Also there was database file of Windows Internal Database (that's how I store the information about my WSUS).
Moving WSUS content is a really easy task involving just a few steps.
It requires just one command.
wsusutil movecontent [path to new location] [path to log file]
(Location of wsusutil command is %drive%\Program Files\Update Services\Tools)
It's a bit strange, but the command couldn't run successfully and terminated with error "access to log file path is denied" nevertheless it had "everyone full access, network service full access, etc." permissions. The solution I found, was to create a simple txt file and point the command to it rather than to the folder. That's funny that the file has to be created manually.

To move database files, I had to install SQL Server Management Studio Express.
Fill the following parameters In the connection dialogue box:
Server Type: Database Engine
Servername: \\.\pipe\MSSQL$MICROSOFT##SSEE\sql\query
Authentication: Windows Authentication

In the "Databases" find "SUSDB", click on "Tasks" and then "Detach". In the dialogue box select "Drop connections".
Then we have to simply copy the folders using explorer or anything else.
When folders are in the right place, open SQL  Server Management Studio Express and right click on "Databases". Select "Attach" and choose the .mdb file.

Done!

Dual-boot Windows XP and Linux Ubuntu time problem

If you are using both Windows and Linux at your PC, then chances are that you will face a problem of time difference between operating systems. To solve this problem:

gksudo gedit /etc/default/rcS

Change UTC=yes to UTC=no