I’ve been able to isolate my VMWare BSODs to hard drive issues. No hard drive has failed – yet, but my first clue was when the Windows crash reports stopped saying “Unknown error” and started saying “Hard drive problem – probably nothing to worry about”  . That “nothing to worry about” ...

Is it me, or are you getting BSODs when installing Server 2003 SP2? I suspect that it’s the VMWare environment that I’m running it under that’s causing the odd problem – how can I get a BSOD under a 2GB 2processor VMWare machine when I don’t get one with a 512MB 1processor VMWare machine? Host memory? Host ...

Through experimentation I found that pre-allocating VMWare disks is the best course of action. Sure, you might over allocate disks sizes on the host, but that can save having to restore a from backup when things go wrong. I recent had the opportunity to experiment with allocating disk or not allocating disks under VMWare. I was under the ...

I was looking for a few documents on VMWare performance. I’ve recently had the notion of building myself a meaty server running Linux (Ubuntu) on which I can run test servers/desktops as much as I want. It saves running them on multiple 500MHz PIIIs which I can get cheap on eBay . I wanted to confirm something I read on how to setup VMWare ...

I had a DC that ran on a old PC. Whilst there was nothing wrong with the hardware, the hard drive used was 10Gb big and it made so much noise it was unbelievable! I quickly grew tired of it – I know PCs aren’t the quietest of things but this was taking the mickey. So I hatched a plan to migrate the whole DC onto a ...