I connect to a virtual machine using vsphere client. I have installed a guest os (windows 10), but now I want to change it to windows server 2016. The os was installed through a datastore iso file. The windows server iso file is also available there.
So, how can I do this? Is there a way to format the drive the windows are installed and start from the beginning? (I don't care to keep any previous files or programs installed). Some other way?
Keep in mind that I don't have complete authority over the vm, so I cannot delete it and recreate it.
Thank you
If you can mount the ISO to the VM itself, you should be fine.
Start by mounting the ISO to the VM, then restart the guest OS. There should be a prompt to boot from ISO, follow that and you will be able to install Server 2016 to the system.
I am going to answer my own question, in case someone else has the same problem.
The guest OS would load immediately, without allowing the user to go to the BIOS and select to boot from the ISO.
There is a setting you can adjust for waiting time before the windows are loaded. This was zero and had to add a few seconds, in order to be able to enter the BIOS.
I am not sure where this setting is, since I was not the one to change it (I didn't have the rights). Maybe someone else can add this.
Related
My friend and I have downloaded some discountinued videogames from Old Games Download - Retrogaming and Abandonware (which I warmly recommend to any CD-ROM aficionado!). We managed to run two of them after downloading them, mounting their .ISO file and installing them on a Windows 10 machine. The process was fairly smooth.
We are struggling to run the other two. They’re only compatible with Windows XP, so we created a virtual box with XP as the OS, but still no luck. We can’t get the virtual box to connect to Wi-Fi in any way, even after following several tutorials found online. We have tried mounting the games’s ISOs in the following ways:
Using Virtual Clone Drive
Using WinCDEmu
Using Win XP Virtual CD Control Panel
And we think we have managed to actually mount the ISO and install the programme on the virtual machine, but the game won’t start anyway. When we try to run it, this window opens:
Monsters & Co CDROM initial window, with title, play button, exit button
But when we click ‘play’ nothing happens. We have checked the “Insert Guest Addition CD Image” setting that triggers Autoplay and it seems to be up and running. What can we try next?
VirtualBox access internet by connecting to your real machine (the host machine) as if it was a router of some kind. There is no need to make the virtual machine (guest machine) use your wifi adapter directly to get internet connection, just add a virtual network adapter to your guest machine and VirtualBox takes care of everything else (but make sure you have checked the appropriated options during installation process so drivers are installed in your host machine).
Now, the game not launching is hard to say, as we don't have any message or other info about what is causing the falling. Yet, this is a 3D game and VirtualBox is not good enough to hand this kind of computation.
I'm new to the WSL2 and wondering if it's possible to run the same WSL2 ubuntu instance on both my desktop and laptop.
Now I am able to use wsl --export and wsl --import method to save and load the system to/from my portable hard drive. But these methods takes a long time.
I notice that wsl --import load a file named ext4.vhdx. Is there a way to load straightly from this file?
Update v2.0:
I was able to get a workaround and it works great.
Thanks to Booting from vhdx here, I was able to load straightly from my vhdx file on my portable hard disk. Windows track down its subsystem with regedit, So we can write our own(p.s: make sure to get BasePath right, it starts with "\\\\?", or you will not be able to access the subsystem' filesystem on your host system.):
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_USERS\【your SID here】\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Lxss\{【UUID here】}]
"State"=dword:00000001
"DistributionName"="distribution name"
"Version"=dword:00000002
"BasePath"="vhdx folder path" 【 e.g. "\\\\?\\E:\\S061\\WSL\\ubuntu-20"】
"Flags"=dword:0000000f
"DefaultUid"=dword:000003e8
I suppose the best way to do this would be to store ext4.vhd on a network storage device accessible to both devices.
I have previosly mentioned how to move ext4.vhd. You can check that out here
Basically you need to export from one machine and import it while making sure the vhd file is configured for wsl to access from the network storage
Since this should *officially* not supported expect some performance hits
Another way would be to run WSL on one computer and ssh/remote desktop to it from another device on the network
I'm of the strong belief that sharing the same ext4 vhd between two VM's simultaneously would be a bad idea. See this and this Unix & Linux StackExchange, including the part about ...
note that sharing LVs/partitions on a single disk between the servers at the same time is NOT very safe. You should only access whole disks from any of the servers at one time.
However, as dopewind's answer mentioned, you can access the WSL instance on one computer (probably the desktop) from another (e.g. the laptop). There are several techniques you can use:
If you have Windows 10 Professional or Enterprise on one of the computers, you can enable Remote Desktop, which allows you to access pretty much everything on one computer from another. RDP ("Remote Desktop Protocol") even works from other devices such as an iPad or Android tablet (or even a phone, although that's a bit of a small screen for a "desktop"). That said, there are better, more idiomatic solutions for WSL ...
You could enable SSH server on the Windows 10 computer with the WSL instance (instructions). This may sound counterintuitive to some people, since Linux itself running in the WSL instance also includes an SSH server (by default). But by SSH'ing from (for example) your laptop into your desktop's Windows 10, you can then launch any WSL instance you have installed (if you choose to install more than one) via wsl -d <distroName>. You also avoid a lot of the network unpleasantness in the next option ...
You could, as mentioned above, enable SSH on the WSL instance (usually something like sudo service ssh start) and then ssh directly into it. However, note that WSL2 instances are NAT'd, so there's a whole lot more hackery that you have to do to get access to the network interface. There's a whole huge thread on the WSL Github about it. Personally, I'd recommend the "Windows SSH Server" option mentioned about to start out with, then you can worry about direct SSH access later if you need it.
Side note: Even though I have SSH enabled on my WSL instances, I still use Windows SSH to proxy to them, to avoid these networking issues.
I am trying to deploy a cent-os 7 VM on a vcenetr from pyvmomi python library and then before powering on the VM I am trying to setup static IP and DNS for the VM.
VM creation goes fine , but guest customization fails, givimg following error:
**Customization of the guest operating system 'rhel6_64Guest' is not sup
ported in this configuration. Microsoft Vista (TM) and Linux guests with Logical
Volume Manager are supported only for recent ESX host and VMware Tools versions
. Refer to vCenter documentation for supported configurations."
faultCause =
faultMessage = (vmodl.LocalizableMessage) []
uncustomizableGuestOS = 'rhel6_64Guest'
Now this customization problem goes away if the VM is just rebooted once. After that we can do the guest customization.
But this reboot takes around 30 seconds of time and for our case , we need to get VMs up and running faster than this time.
Any body who faces similar problem and has some context on it will be very helpful.
Also I don't understand how rebooting the VM solves this problem.
Please share your thoughts even if you don't have exact solutions .
On further Investigation I found that open-vm-tools does not work until the VM is powered on atleast once.
When Machine is powered on , the HOST system detects the open-vm-tools running on guest OS , and from there on open-vm-tools works.
So open-vm-tools can not be used for initial provisioning as it will just not work at the start up.
Cloud-init is the alternative solution which should be used for initial provisioning.
My OS: Windows 8
Virtualbox guest: Ubuntu 12.10 server
I configured apache server on vbox guest and mapped http, https, ssh port successfully into ubuntu server. It works nice without any problem.
I tried several IDEs like PHPStorm, Netbeans, editors like Sublime, all they do is to copy whole project from server, edit on local machine then sync back.
But it is not what I need. I want to work directly on guest server using ssh/sftp connection. I know that notepad++ has this functionality but I love sublime look and feel.
Is there any way to work on guest server with sublime or any other ide for free? (There is sftp solution but it's paid and works just like other ide's, not directly on guest machine) Any suggestions?
There are two approaches you can choose from, you will probably select the second one:
Use the KDE desktop environment (yes, it also exists for MS Windows). It features so called 'kio-slaves' which allow to use any protocol out there as if you were doing local file system operations. That means when using a KDE editor like 'kate' or even a whole IDE like 'kdevelop4' you can simply say "open file/project" and not only choose a local file, but something like sftp://server/path/file and start working. The network stuff is handled transparently by the environment, it is fully network transparent. This is how systems should be like. I think the GNOME environment had something similar, but it probably has been removed with version 3 of GNOME.
You can 'mount' the guests file system into your MS-Windows file system. not sure about the details how this works in MS-Windows, but I am sure that at least newer versions of MS-Windows have gained such feature. Most likely you are still limited to creating something like a "network harddrive" or something, in other systems (linux, unix, macOS) you can mount whereever in the file system you like. You can use any protocol for this, as long as it is supported by the mounting tools of your local system.
Again two options:
2.a You mount the whole virtual disk. Easy, but might be a problem if that disk is currently used by the guest system.
2.b You export the virtual disk by starting some server in the virtual system: samba is most likely your choice. Then you can mount that smb file export inside your MS-Windows system and start hacking.
Have fun!
I read an article here about dokan sshfs for windows. I want to ask if you know similar software (free or not) in order to access windows partitions from windows. Samba is a always an answer, however I am seeking for something more secure.
You can use the Dokan SSHFS client with the OpenSSH server for Windows, you can configure OpenSSH like you would on UNIX, then use the Dokan SSH client to connect remotely, just as you would do on UNIX with sshfs.
When you say Samba, so you mean SMB? Samba is the *NIX client/server for SMB.
SSHFS for accessing Windows partitions from Windows ? Did you by any chance mean Linux partitions from windows ?
If windows-windows, then sorry, no. sshfs is a Linux/Unix feature, and microsoft does all it can to NOT make it work on Windows (after all, that would allow to easily and securely migrate from Windows to Linux). On Windows, you use WebDAV to accomplish similar things, needless to say WebDAV is way more insecure than sshfs.
If you meant accessing remote Linux partitions from Windows, then I had the same problem before:
Dokan doesn't work, at least not on Vista x64. (epic bluescreen crash)
The java sshfs explorer on sourceforge doesn't work, either.
Microsoft's services for unix (including sshfs) are only available on Vista 'Ultimate', not on < Ultimate, like my Vista business for example.
There are some commercial solutions, but first, they are way overpriced, and second, I wouldn't trust them, since they don't offer evaluation.
My solution was to install VirtualBox on Windows, and install an Ubuntu guest on it, mounting the host's C drive. You need to set the VirtualBox network adapter to bridged mode to make sshfs work with virtualization. I'm sorry, but so far that's the only free solution that really works...
imdisk driver, see if http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html helps.
From the documentation
It is even possible to boot a machine
with NTFS partitions using a Unix
Live-CD and use the included devio
tool to let ImDisk on another computer
running Windows on the network mount
the NTFS partition on the machine you
booted with the Unix Live-CD. This way
you can recover information and even
run chkdsk on drives on machines where
Windows does not boot.
I've been using Win SSHFS for awhile, is this what you're looking for?
https://github.com/Foreveryone-cz/win-sshfs/
It runs on top of Dokany