How to Enable Telnet on Windows 7

I still rely on Telnet. The problem is Windows 7 does not enable the Telnet client by default. Well here's how in 5 quick steps! 

1. Start Button then select the Control Panel
2. Select Programs And Features
3. Select Turn Windows Features On or Off
4. Check off the Telnet Client
5. Select OK

How to remove a Virtual Center Server from Liked Mode

No option is available to remove a Virtual Center Server from a Linked Mode VC. You must run the VC setup again in order to remove the VC Server from linked mode.
1. Run Virtual Center setup.exe
2. Choose Modify Linked Mode configuration
3. Make sure that the Isolate this VCenter Server instance from linked mode group is checked off before slecting Next
Be Patient this can take a while...
You also will lose conncetivity to VCenter during this process and you will need to restart the VI client.

My top 5 VMware Tools

1. Putty http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
2. RVTools http://www.robware.net/
3. RDP Plugin http://xtravirt.com/vsphere-client-rdp-plug-in
4. FastSCP from Veeam http://www.veeam.com/
5. WinSCP http://winscp.net/eng/download.php

Installing VMtools on a Novell Sever VM

Power on the Novell Server VM
Select VM and then select Install VMware Tools
Open a console session on the Novell VM Server
Close the Novell GUI if it is running 
From the Novell Server : Prompt
: Load CDDVD
: vmwtools:\setup.ncf
Once the VMtools install has completed you can End the VMware Tools Install
Done!

Cannot log into VI client- "The server could not interpret the communication from the client. (The remote server returned an error: (503) Server Unavailable)".

Here's a good one. I created a 2 ESX Server "Sandbox environment" for my lab testing with 1 Windows 2008 VM providing DNS to the test servers. The idea was to use the 2 ESX servers with a Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SAN to test replication and failover from the prodcution tot the DR site of the Windows 2008 server. I ran into some trouble when I rebooted the ESX severs I could not log back in to either of the ESX servers with the VI client. I came accross this article below which helped me out tremendously and put an end to this madness. I know that normally this would not be a problem since a DNS server would be up and running at both the production and DR sites however, in my sanbox this was not the case. I changed the Windows 2008 VM to automatically startup with the ESX host so that I would have a DSN server available to the ESX servers.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1012942

Anyway...The moral of the short story is to make sure your DNS server is up and running before you try to login to the ESX servers otherwise you could be waiting a while to login to the VI client.