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When installing vCenter update manager in a lab, I got this :

“Error 25005.Setup failed to generate the SSL keys”

It appears that since I have installed vCenter Server, vSphere client, and tried to install the update manager all in one sitting without rebooting, there has been some path confusion and it could not find openssl.exe (or the right version of it). Allowing it to roll back, rebooting, and trying again fixed the issue for me.

Here is a list of what I used last week, right after taking the ICM course for vSphere, in order to pass my VCP exam.

vSphere4 Card | vReference

This little document packs a lot of punch, read it a few times !

A lot of people running ESX 3.5 Update 2 have been experiencing a slight bug where you can’t start or restart VMs starting August 12th 2008. Well, that could be a problem.

Here’s a thread about the issue with some workarounds which involve messing with the host’s time. (Watch out not to sync your Domain controllers with the wrong time, or bye bye Kerberos!).

Also, today is patch Tuesday by Microsoft and I’m sure a lot of people will be installing critical security patches and rebooting Virtual Machines. That should be interesting…but hey, people will learn not to patch stuff too fast.

The real issue with this is that VMware, an enterprise solution, has built-in license management. How can companies not realize that schemes such as this always hurt the honest customer? The dishonest ones are probably running cracked versions that weren’t affected by this.

Vmware

When I use Windows virtual machines, sometimes the system beep gets annoying to my neighbors.

When I use Linux virtual machines, it goes through my laptop’s PC Speaker, which makes me have a heart attack, and annoys my neighbor.

Find your Vmware preferences file

Windows: Application Data\VMware\preferences.ini

Linux: ~/vmware/preferences (you could possibly do it in the system wide config as well)

Add this line:

mks.noBeep = TRUE

All beeps should be gone.

Windows itself

If for some reason you use some other Virtualization product that does not allow you to disable beeps, just create a Group Policy on your test domain (you could do it local as well). Configure any non critical service in the GPO to be DISABLED. (I use the print spooler).

Once that is done, browse to the sysvol, find the GPO’s folder, and edit the security policy text file. Replace the name of the service you disabled with “beep”.

The reason we have to do that is because you don’t see the beep service in the list of the GPO editor. But this effectively disables the beep service that Windows uses, well, to beep ! I deploy this on test domains where I “beep” often.