SysAdmin Talk

Since I started deploying more and more Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machines I have noticed an issue that the standard VMware Tools Display Driver has with Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2 and seemingly Vista too. It seems to occur at random times; you’ll definitely know when it strikes, as your VM’s console will completely freeze up on you.

Normal network activity to and from the VM seems function normally so the underlying OS is obviously fine to continue working. You can even connect via RDP to the VM and use it that way if you wish. However lacking a console session to the VM is not exactly very useful. A restart of the VM will sort it out temporarily, but again this is not very helpful as the issue will undoubtedly occur again. Here are my tips to counter this unpleasant isssue.

If you currently allow your end-users to manage distribution group membership in a previous version of Exchange, you may be interested to know that like many things, the process for enabling this is completely different in Exchange 2010. This is because distribution group membership management permissions are now delegated through Role Based Access Control (RBAC).