While setting up vCAC 6.0 in my home lab, I encountered the following error when trying to deploy a machine from a blueprint. Error requesting machine. Inner Exception: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. Base Exception: The partner transaction manager has disabled its support for remote/network transactions. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8004D025) I found a VMware KB article for an earlier version along similar lines which requires configuring some MSDTC settings on the SQL server holding the vCAC database.

As part of my preparation for the VCAP5-DCA I needed to sharpen up a bit in some of the cmdline areas that I wasn’t overly familiar with. Listed in the blueprint for the exam are areas such as creating storage claimrules with esxcli, using vscsiStats or creating ESXi Image builds. Some of these cmdline tools are more discoverable than others and while you aren’t required to memorise how they all work since you have the documentation available in the exam, you won’t really have time to look it up.

I was experiencing some issues running Office 2013 64-bit inside a Windows 7 64-bit VM in VMware Fusion 6. In particular Word crashing more than Word in Office for Mac (which is saying something) and Excel barely usable, crashing often less than a couple of minutes after being started. Some research led me to this VMware Communities post and other similar suggestions around turning on Disable hardware graphics acceleration and turning off Use subpixel positioning to smooth fonts on screen.

I needed to connect two external monitors to my MacBook Pro and use them with a Windows VM inside Fusion 6. Initially when I connected both, Windows would only recognise one of the external monitors, seemingly dependent on which was connected first. A communities posting revealed a similar issue along these lines. Essentially the automatic detection of the monitors was not working correctly and the suggestion was to power down the VM and update the VM’s vmx file with the below:

Creating your own aliases in PowerShell is pretty straightforward. The New-Alias cmdlet allows you to create handy shortcuts for existing cmdlets or functions you have created yourself. I write a lot of functions for my own modules, so having shortcuts for some of these functions would be pretty useful when using them via a module. However, when I first added some to one of my modules they weren’t available for use.

During setting up an iSCSI LUN on my new Synology box (DSM 4.3), I encountered an issue where the first ESXi box would connect successfully to the iSCSI target, but not the second. So no devices showing on the second node after configuring the iSCSI adapter, despite no apparent errors during the config process. Looking at the Synology box showed the first ESXi node connected (172.20.0.210), but not the second.

During the setup wizard of the vCenter Server Appliance I experienced an error at the step to make it Active Directory Enabled. In this instance I received the below error: Failed to execute ‘/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg ‘ad’ ’test’ ‘sunnydale\vcentersvc’ CENSORED ‘sunnydale.local’’: VC_CFG_RESULT=309(Error: Invalid hostname. FQDN is required for joining a domain.) Initially I thought it may be something to do with how I was specifying the AD domain name or username. Didn’t get very far with that, so I skipped it for the time being and decided to come back to it later.

Saw this tweet yesterday about an equivalent of tail -f in PowerShell (I think Simon meant Get-Content) In PowerShell v3 the Get-Content cmdlet received an additional parameter -Tail. This means rather than pulling back the whole of a text or log file, you can just get the last x lines, e.g. Get-Content .\\vmkernel.log -Tail 10 Nice, but how can we make this more friendly to those used to typing tail -f?

There are a number of different ways to test for the presence of a registry key and value in PowerShell. Here’s how I like to go about it. We’ll use an example key HKLM:\SOFTWARE\TestSoftware with a single value Version: Check for the key You can use the Test-Path cmdlet to check for the key, but not for specific values within a key. For example Test-Path 'HKLM:\\SOFTWARE\\TestSoftware' but not Test-Path 'HKLM:\\SOFTWARE\\TestSoftware\\Version' So for the value we need to work a bit harder.

Quite a common request for working with Windows machines is to report the software installed on them. If you don’t have a centralised system for reporting on client software (many places don’t) then you may turn to some form of scripted method to obtain this information. Most people tend to head to Add / Remove Programs when thinking about what software is installed in Windows. However, not all applications will always populate information in there, depending on how they have been installed.