NewSID Destroys Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7 VMs

A friend of mine just sent me and article on how to change the SID on Windows 2008 and Windows 7 machines. Old faithful newsid.exe no longer works. Sysprep is now built in to the Windows OS. Here's the article:

http://www.brajkovic.info/windows-server-2008/windows-server-2008-r2/how-to-change-sid-on-windows-7-and-windows-server-2008-r2-using-sysprep/

Thanks to Scott Aisenstat for sending me the link

~ Scott March

vBeers - Stamford Connecticut

Come join us at the first Stamford vBeers get together - This is a great opportunity to meet with other virtualization enthusiasts and professionals and enjoy discussing all things virtualization, and in fact anything else that comes up in conversation… It is not a sponsored event and although vendors are most welcome any sales hats must be left at the door.

Stamford vBeers is held on the first Thursday of every month starting at 6pm. The first vBeers will be May 5th at ‘Tiernan's Bar and Restaurant. Tiernans has a great selection of beers along with soft drinks and some really good food. What more could you ask for?

vBeers is open to everyone so whether you are a VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer user/fan or none of the above it really doesn’t matter as “it’s all about the virtualization”.

See You there.

Location: Tiernan's Bar and Restaurant, Stamford CT
Address: 187 Main Street, Stamford, CT 06901
Date: 05/05/2011
Time: 6:00pm

~ Scott March

Hypervisor Shootout - VMware versus Microsoft HyperV and Citrix Xen.

A company named Taneja Group did an in depth study benchmarking the performance of  the three leading hypervisors.. Their main focus was trying to understand which one offered the best virtual machine densities for various types of workloads. Great job!  Rather than reposting  it, I'm just going to add the link.

Enjoy:

 http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmware-maximize-workload-density-tg.pdf

I big thanks to the engineers at Taneja.....


~ Scott March

Expanding a Disk on a Windows 2003 VM using Diskpart.

You know its amazing what you can forget when  it's 2am, you just worked 18 hours and your brain is absolute mush. That  happened to me last night. LOL!  Here you go just in case it happens to you.

To use Diskpart.exe, follow these steps:


1. Open a command prompt by going to Start
Run.

2. Enter diskpart in the Open text box, and press [Enter].

3. At the DISKPART prompt, enter list volume.

4. Enter select volume x, where x is the volume number listed that you want to expand.

5. Enter extend, and press [Enter].

That's it. Just go to the Disk Management snap-in to checkout your new volume. It should now take up the rest of the available space on the drive.

The OS Drive isn't as simple. For that you need a utility like GParted. GParted does require a reboot so make sure you have a maintenance window to make the changes.

Tutorial: GParted Tutorial
Download: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php

~ Scott

Daily PowerCLI Primer - Set Storage Multipathing Policy to Round Robin

Here's a quick script to set multipathing policy to Round Robin on an ESX host named esxhost:

Get-VMHost -Name "esxhost.com" | Get-ScsiLun -LunType "disk" | where {$_.MultipathPolicy –ne "RoundRobin"} | Set-ScsiLun -MultipathPolicy "RoundRobin"

~ Manoj Thundil