Word KB2837593 patch causing 100% CPU useage

Updating an image for a VMWare View VDI Desktop, I applied all of the recent Microsoft Office 2010 patches. However, when the desktops were refreshed, all started three copies of Winword.exe running under the System account. One of these copies of Word was using 100% which created mayhem on the VDI platform.

I've removed KB2837593 from the VMWare View VDI desktop image and the platform seems to have stabilised. We aren't seeing this on our Citrix XenDesktop platform, but this also doesn't have the KB2837593 patch applied yet.

Has anyone else seen this? Please feedback if you have.

VMWare Server v1.0.3 unable to bridge to wireless network on Vista

I've been trying to test some printing configurations on SLES 10 SP1 but I couldn't get my laptop running Windows Vista Ultimate and VMWare Server v1.0.3 to successfully bridge onto the wireless adaptor.

I could use NAT but then it was difficult to test connectivity to the server.

Having hunted around a bit I found this useful post: Abstract path:VMWare, Wireless Network Adapter and Bridging

This pointed to a VMWare article which allows the Vista adaptor bridging feature to be enabled between the onboard wireless card and the virtual adaptor created by VMware.

Before this fix I could only contact the host wireless IP address, now I can connect to everything but! If anyone knows how to get the VMWare native bridging feature to work, please get in touch.

N.B. The only step missing from the above articles was that you must create a VMware virtual adaptor (I used adapator #2) and delete the DHCP scope for it. Fail to do the and you will leak DHCP onto your wireless network!

VMware on Suse 10.1

I've tried using CrossOffice to run MS Office applications on Linux but you really can't beat VMWare with an XP guest machine to run Outlook. That is unless you can't get VMWare to run. Thanks to Nilesh Bansal, now I can. 

Building an MS Cluster with VMWare Workstation 4.5.2

I used to be able to build clusters in VMWare Workstation 4, I'm sure, but when I recently tried it didn't seem to work any more. I found someone (sorry - lost the URL) on the VMWare forums who claimed to have created one on VMWare workstation 5. I tried thier suggestions on VMWare 4.5.2 and with a few changes it worked for me. I created the quorum (100MB) and shared disk (2GB) as fixed size SCSI devices.

Here are the important lines from my node_1.vmx file:

diskLib.dataCacheMaxSize = "0"
diskLib.dataCacheMaxReadAheadSize = "0"
diskLib.dataCacheMinReadAheadSize = "0"
diskLib.dataCachePageSize = "4096"
diskLib.maxUnsyncedWrites = "0"

disk.locking=FALSE

scsi0.present = "TRUE"
scsi0.virtualDev = "lsilogic"
scsi0:0.present = "TRUE"
scsi0:0.fileName = "Disk1.vmdk"
scsi1.present = "TRUE"
scsi1.virtualDev = "lsilogic"
scsi1.sharedBus = "virtual"

scsi1:1.present = "TRUE"
scsi1:1.fileName = "..\shared\quorum.vmdk"
scsi1:1.redo = ""
scsi1:1.mode = "independent-persistent"
scsi1:1.deviceType = "plainDisk"

scsi2.present = "TRUE"
scsi2.virtualDev = "lsilogic"
scsi2.sharedBus = "virtual"
scsi2:1.present = "TRUE"
scsi2:1.fileName = "..\shared\shared.vmdk"
scsi2:1.redo = ""
scsi2:1.mode = "independent-persistent"
scsi2:1.deviceType = "plainDisk"