0x0000009D on Win7 with VMWare Workstation and starting a host

I got a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) on my Windows 7 x64 bit laptop when starting VMWare hosts with a 0x0000009D STOP message.

After doing some investigations some forums gave me hints to try “verifier /reset” whichs resets “Driver Verifier” settings (link).

VMWare vSphere 4 on Windows 7 RC

Yesterday I needed to logon to our VMWare vShpere 4 console using my Windows 7 RC. After upgrading the client to the newest version and entering id/password a error box came up;

Error parsing the server “[server/ip]” “clients.xml” file. Login will continue, contact your system administrator.

And after that the following;

The type initializer for ‘VirtualInfrastructure.Utils.HttpWebRequestProxy’ threw an exception.

So I couldn’t get into VMWare management console. After some googling and testing there is a solution for the problem.

1. Download this file (contains a .config file and a system.dll from .Net 3.5 SP1)
2. Create a folder LIB in %programfiles%\VMWare\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher
3. Copy the system.dll file into the LIB folder
4. Create a system variable DEVPATH that points to %programfiles%\VMWare\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\LIB
5. Replace the VpxClient.exe.config in the %programfiles%\VMWare\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher with the new file

Now will the vSphere 4.0 work correctly.

Setup NLB cluster on cloned server on VMWare plattform

I have had problems setting up a cloned server on VMWare with NLB (Network Load Balancing) on Windows 2003 (SP2). The error when trying to add the second host to the NLB cluster is: No interfaces are available for installing a new cluster

The reason for this is that every NIC creates a GUID in registry (HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\NetworksCards). To be able to set up NLB correctly every NIC needs a uniqe GUID (the settings for NLB are stored in HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\WLBS).

Solution when cloning servers
Remove the NIC from Device Manager (devmgmt.msc) and do a hardware rescan to add the same NIC with a new GUID.

Unicast/multicast on VMWare
VMWare supports both unicast and multicast but it's easier to implement multicast (this is dependent of how ARP addresses are updated). More information is found in KB1556 in the VMWare knowledge base.