Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Vista and Windows 7 desktop icons

Right Click on the Desktop
Select Personalize
Select Change Desktop Icons
Check Mark the Desktop icons you wish to show and Select OK

Thursday, May 6, 2010

How to Increase the VMFS datastore default 1MB block size of the local storage during the installation of ESX 4.0

I needed to create a VM with a 600GB vmdk. Therefore, I needed to increase the default 1MB block size of the local datastore during installation to support the block change of 4MB that I wanted. I found the VMware KB below as my reference and I was finally able to do what I needed.
I have modified the steps below that I took to make it a bit easier.

VMware KB Reference
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1012683

1. Boot to the ESX installation DVD
2. Wait for the installation process to begin once it does Press Ctrl+Alt+F2 to switch to the shell
3. # ps grep Xorg
4. Kill the PID where 590 is the PID.For example: # kill 590 or kill 509
5. # cd /usr/lib/vmware/weasel
6. Edit the config file: # vi fsset.py
7. Locate class vmfs3FileSystem(FileSystemType):
8. Edit the blockSizeMB parameter to the block size that you want it to be. It is currently set to 1. The only values that work correctly are 1, 2, 4, and 8
9. Press i for insert mode
10. To save Esc, then :wq! and press Enter. The exclamation mark is required to save a file that is in red-only mode
11. You can verify that file has been modified by typing the following command bleow:
# grep -i blockSizeMB fsset.py
12. # cd /
13. Now launch the ESX4 installer with the new configuration of the new block size. # /bin/weasel
14. At this point you can continue your ESX4 installation
Done!