UPDATE - May 25, 2010 - It appears that our Dell DSET problem is hardware-related. We seem to have some hardware problems which are causing the DSET utility to reboot our ESX host. If you are having this issue, you should call Dell and let them know (you probably are already in contact with Dell if you're running DSET).

We'll let you know what we find out with regard to our hardware.

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We've been having problems deploying Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machines from templates using the VMware vCenter and it's built in guest customization.

It appears that there may be an issue either with Microsoft's built-in sysprep utility in 2008 R2, or with VMware's vCenter guest customization wizard when using a Key Management Server, or KMS. A KMS is part of Microsoft's Volume Activation 2.0 as described here - http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/existing-customers/product-activation... and in this TechNet article - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb892849.aspx

I've had this a couple of times now in the last few weeks. I wanted to try out the Linux KVM virtualization hypervisor that comes with Fedora 11 since VMware Server 2 is giving my fits on F11 x86_64 so I installed qemu and all the supporting packages via yum.

I realized that I can't do some things with KVM that I can with VMware Server so I'm putting up with the signal 6 crashes every week or so and went back to VMware Server 2.0.1 for Linux. In order to get that running I had to apply some patches to get the kernel modules compiled but that's been done for a while.

There are a lot of postings out on the Net about performance tuning VMware products to run more efficiently. I'd thought I'd share some that I thought were farily useful (most related to running VMware Server on a Linux host).