Here’s a new  whitepaper from VMware on Understanding Oracle Certification, Support and Licensing for VMware Environments

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vmw-understanding-oracle-certification-supportlicensing-environments.pdf

For ESX and ESXi 4.0 hosts

1. Go to Host > Configuration > Advanced settings.
2. In the Advanced settings window, select SCSI.
3. Change the Scsi.UWConflictRetries value to 80.

For ESX and ESXi 4.1 hosts

1. Go to Host > Configuration > Advanced Settings.
2. Select SCSI.
3. Change the Scsi.CRTimeoutDuringBoot value to 1.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1016106

Key Features

Windows 7 Support – Full support for Windows 7 desktops as a host OS or guest (virtualized) desktop to help customers with the migration to Windows 7 environments to help customers migrate to Windows 7 at double the speed and half the cost of a traditional physical Windows 7 migration.

View Client with Local Mode – The industry’s first integrated offline virtual desktop solution allowing users to download View desktops onto a local device and execute locally with or without a network connection. View Client with Local Mode helps IT organizations securely enable mobile user, contractor and Employee Owned IT (EOIT) use cases.

View Administrator Enhancements – Including a new look and feel, increased performance, improved scalability and new efficiencies through dashboards and the integration of application assignment to help simplify desktop management.

Kiosk Mode – Allow multiple users to share a published virtual desktop from a kiosk in a public or other shared space. Kiosk Mode helps to enable and simplify the delivery of kiosk based applications to end-users

http://www.vmware.com/products/view/overview.html

Key Features

• Create virtual datacenters
• Support multi-tenant environments
• Self Service Portals
• vSheild Security
• vCloud API and Automation

Basically sits on top of vCenter/ESX(i) and offers self service portals useful for multi-tenant environments.

Product Site

http://www.vmware.com/products/vcloud-director/

Will post more info on this later. Do ask if you have any questions..

This is an issue with Microsoft Windows Installer and does not affect all Windows 2008 systems. The problem can occur when the original install path from the older version of VMware Tools is invalid

To correct this issue, you must perform a forced uninstall and re-install of VMware Tools.

To uninstall and re-install VMware Tools:

1. Right-click on the virtual machine.
2. Click Guest > Install/Upgrade VMware Tools.
3. Open a Console to the virtual machine and log into the guest operating system.
4. Click Start > Run, type cmd, and click OK to open a command prompt in Windows.
5. Change the drive to your CD-ROM drive. For example, D:\.
6. Type setup /c and press Enter to force removal of all registry entries and delete the old version of VMware Tools.
7. In My Computer, double click the CD-ROM that contains VMware Tools.
8. Select setup.exe to install if Auto-Run doesn’t start.

Came across above error with vconverter 4.0.1 build 161434 and the older versions with server 2008 r2 64bit cold v2v convert.

Vconvert doesn’t properly support server 2008 64bit R2. Way around it is to change the Guest Operating System from virtual machine settings to Vista 64bit and vconvert will detect the vm and convert fine. After the conversion, change the OS back to server 2008 64bit R2.

vConvert won’t let you reduce the size of vm on virtual machine hardware 7. Only option is to use Thin Provision.

The Install Shield package of VirtualCenter files is a 16-bit application that uses 8.3 file notation.
Your system may have 8.3 file name creation disabled by the Administrators or Group policy in order to increase performance on an NTFS file system.
This message is shown because there is an unknown parameter passed to the msiexec command.
Typically, this error is because the installer does not quote the %TMP% and %TEMP% variables, and if they are configured with some blank space file path, the installation fails.

Solution:

Set the %temp% environment variable to use an 8.3 naming convention path (that is, C:\temp).
You must create a new temporary folder for the installation and set the environment variables %TMP%, %TEMP% to use it:

This can be changed from Systems Properties – Advanced – Environmental Variables.