P2V - OEM Windows OS

So here I am up at 4:00AM on a Sunday morning having spent the past 4 hours on the phone with Microsoft Licensing/Professional Services/Partner support only to confirm what various google searches tell me that the OEM Windows key must die with physical server.  In a nutshell, this is what needs to happen in order to my virtualized copy activated.

1)  Get VLK media
2)  Get VL Key
3)  Boot VM to it
4)  Select option to install Windows
5)  Select option to repair it (note this is not the recovery console which is what you would get if you selected "r" on the previous screen.
6)  Next > next wizard and type in your VL key

Reboot and we're done here.

PS - This was on server 2003 standard

VMware image customization in progress

Full credit to this post for such a great find.
http://blog.laspina.ca/ubiquitous/vmware_image_customization_in_progress

I've been noticing this error while deploying some VM's using vCenter's guest customization wizard.  It kept appearing after each restart.



I had previously been using an older template that was sealed via sysprep at OS level which worked fine for the past few years.  It was only when I decided to switch my template to use vCenter's guest customization did I start having this problem.

The quick and easy fix was to remove sysprepDecrypter.exe from the regkey below.





Despite this problem, I didn't seem to have a problem with new SID generation.  PSGetSid was used to verify a unique SID on each new vm which seemed to work every time.  On a final note, I did have a intermittent problem with the hostname not being updated to what was specified during the guest customization wizard.  When this happened, I simply updated the hostname manually.

Module DevicePowerOn failed

Encountered this error when importing vmdks from VMware workstation or fusion to ESXi.

An unexpected error was received from the ESX host while powering on VM vm-1504.
Module DevicePowerOn power on failed.
Unable to create virtual SCSI device for scsi0:0, '/vmfs/volumes/4fcd0d6b-387b9d9a-520a-001a4b503824/xxxxx/xxxxx/xxxxx.vmdk'
Failed to open disk scsi0:0: Unsupported or invalid disk type 7.  Ensure that the disk has been imported.

Run vmkfstools -i to clone disk to an ESXi supported format.

# vmkfstools -i original.vmdk converted.vmdk
Destination disk format: VMFS zeroedthick
Cloning disk 'original.vmdk'...
Clone: 100% done.

VM KB
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1028943

If this doesn't work, use VMware converter to import the VM into a vCenter instance or directly to an ESXi host.  In most cases, it would probably be more simple to do this in the first place...

Commvault Virtual iDA - Change proxy mount path used for vdisk backups

So I needed to backup an old ESXi server that was incompatible with VADP.  VCB fallback had to be used on this proxy machine in order to get full disk level backups.

Prerequisites

• Install VCB on proxy
• Install VMware Converter on proxy
• Proxy must have ample disk space to accommodate vmdk's

My problem was that I did not have ample disk space in the default location where the proxy copies these vmdk's.  The default path is "C:\Program Files\CommVault\Simpana\iDataAgent\JobResults"

Location
Windows	HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\CommVault Systems\Galaxy\<Instance>\
Unix	Not Applicable
NetWare	Not Applicable
Key	VirtualServer (standard)
Value	dVMSnapMountPath (optional)
Value Type (Windows only)	STRING
Valid Range	<full_mount_path>
Default Value	<job_results_folder>
Created in	Proxy Computer
Description	This registry key allows you to change the mount path used for backups to a location other than the original proxy computer.
Applies To	Virtual Server iDataAgent

Link to CV KB.
http://documentation.commvault.com/hds/release_8_0_0/books_online_1/english_us/features/registry_keys/registry_keys.htm#dVMSnapMountPath