Change The Storage Location Of 'My Documents'

Normally windows saves the "My Documents" folder on your C-drive. 

But when you right-click on it and go to properties, you can change the location where you want windows to save your Documents folder.
 

I have a partition set up with just windows on it, and all my things i want to keep are on different partitions/disks. 

So now I put My Documents on another partition than where I have windows installed. 

If windows screws up and you have to format your C-drive again, your documents will be spared at least...

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How to run XenServer 6.0 on vSphere 5 - with nested Windows Server 2008 R2 VM

It is possible to install XenServer 6.0 in a virtual machine on vSphere ESXi 5 and then with a few tweaks you can even run a nested Windows Server 2008 R2 VM on the virtual XenServer 6.0.

One important step is to execute the following command from the console:

echo 'vhv.allow = "TRUE"' >> /etc/vmware/config

Otherwise, configure like the guide. Once the custom VM has been created, to be able to choose ESXi 5 as operating system, go to Edit Settings -> Options -> Guest Operating System choose 'Other' and then choose VMware ESXi 5.x. This will ensure that you won't receive the "HVM is required for this operation" error when trying to boot the win2k8R2 vm (it is possible to change this after the install of XenServer as well).

Download the install .iso from citrix.com 

Mount iso and install XenServer

When done, you will get startup screen as below

Download XenCenter from citrix.com and install

Add the the XenServer to XenCenter

Create a new VM, choose win2k8 R2 64-bit, mount ISO, install.

Done.

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Updating VMware Tools on Red Hat Enterprise/Scientific/CentOS Linux 6 for VMware ESXi 5

With the upgrade to ESXi 5 the update process for the tools installed from the repository is not very seamless because of some update issues in addition to package changes.

First off, to get the VMware tools packages updated it is important to upgrade to the latest version of Red Hat/Scientific/CentOS Linux 6 due to some issues with the yum version distributed originally with 6.0. VMware has disabled the automatic update due to this issue:

http://packages.vmware.com/tools/docs/engineering-release-notes/rhel-upgrade

I am using Scientific Linux 6, for Red Hat and CentOS the upgrade process should be similar but most likely will have a few differences. Be careful to test your software installed because doing the following procedure will result in a minor version upgrade (6.1 at the time of this writing):

https://www.scientificlinux.org/documentation/howto/upgrade.6x

Now it is time to get the VMware tools updated. First you will want to remove the old version distributed from the package repository. The other VMware tools packages should be automatically removed since they depend on this kernel module.

# yum remove vmware-open-vm-tools-kmod

Verify all VMware tools packages are removed, RPM should return no results. Remove any additional VMware packages if necessary.

# rpm -qa | grep vmware

Now you’ll need to edit the original yum repo file created for the VMware tools repository:

# nano /etc/yum.repos.d/vmware-tools.repo

Modify the “baseurl” directive to be similar to below.

baseurl=http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/5.0/rhel6/i386

I am using the 32-bit Linux version so I have i386 at the end, substitute x86_64 if using the 64-bit version.

Now you need to clean out the cached info about the repositories so that it will read the package info from the modified VMware repo:

# yum clean all

Install the kernel module packages:

# yum install vmware-tools-esx-kmods

If you are using the PAE kernel you’ll need to append “-PAE”  or “-pae” with no space before at the end of the command above.

Time to install the new VMware tools, in my case I’ll install without graphical components since my Linux servers don’t run with a GUI:

# yum install vmware-tools-esx-nox

Or use this if your Linux VM is running with a graphical interface:

# yum install vmware-tools-esx

That should do it. Your VMware tools should now be updated to the latest version available with ESXi 5.

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Splitting your WINRAR files to parts

1. Open the WinRar application and choose the source file,

2. now right-click the file or folder you want to split, 

3. and select "Add files to Archive" or simply press [Alt] + A. which opens "Archive name and parameters" window, 

4. now find among tabs (on the General tab) "Split to volumes, bytes" select the option which suites you best. 

5. Afterward press Ok.

NOTE:

But let me inform you that the split on both the 700MB media disc will only serve as data backup, and won't be able to work without any of one dics. Since both the splits (assuming to 2 splits only) need each other to get extracted and work as a single data.

Good Luck!

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Configuring iSCSI for vSphere 5

Configuring a software iSCSI initiator for ESXi 5.0 is a relatively simple operation. This quick guide assumes that you have already configured an iSCSI target and published it on the network.

For inspiration, have a look at this VMware KB

Create a new vSwitch (Configuration -> Networking -> Add Networking) and add a VMkernel. Configure it with an IP address. 

Go to Storage adapters and click "Add" to add a software iSCSI adapter if it does not exist already.

Once added, right click the software initiator and choose "properties". 

Go to Network Configuration tab and click "Add".

Choose the vSwitch/VMkernel that you created above.

Go ot Dynamic Discovery tab and click "Add" to add an iSCSI target

You will be prompted to input IP address of the iSCSI target, just leave port 3260 as default unless you have configured it differently on your target.

Go to Configuration -> Storage and click "Add storage". Click DISK/LUN and next. If everything has been done correctly, you be able to see your published iSCSI target and can then add and format it with the new VMFS5 file system, uh lala!

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Upgrading vCenter v4.1 to v5.0

I just upgraded my home lab vCenter server the other day from v4.1 to v5 and took some screen dumps of the installation process. The steps look fairly familiar compared to earlier versions. At one point in the installation I had an error stating that:

"The Fully Qualified Domain Name cannot be resolved. If you continue the installation, some features might not work correctly"

The reason for this error is that I had not created a reverse lookup on the DNS server.
Here are the screen dumps:

It was at this step that the DNS error ocurred. Below image shows how a reverse lookup zone was created on the DNS server.

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Manual virus removal from 'System Volume information'

In Windows,  System Volume Information is a system folder, to keep track of the changes took placed on a partition in a fix time period. This folder exists in every partition on your HDD. By default this folder is hidden, but you can see it by showing the hidden and system files and folders.The information stored in these folders helps Windows to revert to an earlier state, when you use the System Restore tool.

But sometimes, some malware files get in the System Volume Information folder. This can happens by any of following reasons:

1.  the malware wants to get there so that user doesn't have access to delete it and from where it can restore itself, 
2. or some malware file gets deleted and Windows decides that the file was important and it automatically stores it there, in case you ever want it back.

Well, you can easily clean malware infection from this folder by using the following simple steps:

• Right click on My Computer, then go to Properties
• Now in Windows XP:  Go to System Restore tab, enable the option Disable System Restore on all drives and click Apply. This should erase all System Restore Points, including the infected file(s).
• In Windows 7: Go to System Protection > then under protection settings choose hard drive that have malware and click Configure > Turn off system Protection > ok
• After this, again enable the system Restore option and press Apply again, so that you'll re-enable System Restore.

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