Ritch's Tech Blog

Creating and Importing an Outlook 2007 Profile on Citrix

2008-10-01T11:43:00.000-04:00

If you need to autocreate an Outlook 2007 profile for use on Citrix, you can use the Office Customization Tool (OCT). Complete the following after Outlook 2007 is installed on the Citrix server:

1. Run the Office setup.exe with the /admin switch.
2. From the Outlook profile option in the OCT, create a New Profile and save as a .prf file (i.e.
default.prf).
3. Specify the Exchange Server settings (e.g. server name, cache mode on/off).
4. Copy the .prf file to a share where all Outlook users have permissions.
5. Publish Outlook with the following syntax to import the .prf file (all on the Command line field of the published application):

"c:\program files\microsoft office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE" /importprf
"c:\program files\microsoft office\Office12\default.prf"

When Outlook is launched first time users will not be prompted to create a profile rather the profile will be created automatically!

The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created

2008-10-01T11:15:00.000-04:00

After expanding the virtual disk (.vmdk) of an ESX 3.5 virtual machine, the virtual machine would not start generating the following error: The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created. I followed the instructions from Samuel Lai at his blog, http://driveactivated.com/blog/archive/2007/11/06/recovering-vmware-snapshot-after-parent-changed.aspx. However, this did not work for me. Since this was a fairly new VM I wasn't too concerned about the changes made it the snapshots I did the following:

NOTE: Following these steps will cause you to lose all data and changes saved in the snapshot(s).

1. Shutdown the VM.

2. SSH'd to the ESX Server.

3. CD'd to the virtual machine's directory.

4. Used VI to edit the .vmx file.

5. Changed the scsi0:0.fileName from the ".vmdk" to the main drive vmdk,

".vmdk".

6. Started the VM successfully.

There is probably a better way but it got my VM up and running.

Expanding an ESX 3.5 VM Disk (vmdk) without VirtualCenter

2008-10-01T10:57:00.000-04:00

If you need to expand an existing virtual machines disk (.vmdk) and you do not have VMware VirtualCenter, use the vmkfstools command. You will need to SSH to the physical ESX server. I use PuTTY (http://www.putty.org/) to SSH to the ESX servers. Once connected to the ESX server and cd'd to the desired VM directory, run the vmkfstools command with the following syntax:

vmkfstools -X <size> G <.vmdk file name>

Example: To expand the disk for the VM with the Windows Server 2008.vmdk to 100GB run the following:

vmkfstools -X 100G Windows Server 2008.vmdk

Installing JRE 1.6.0_05 or later on Windows Server 2008 x64

2008-10-01T10:38:00.000-04:00

One of the prerequisites for installing Citrix XenApp 5.0 on Windows Server 2008 x64 is to install the JRE 1.6.0 Update 5 or later. I downloaded and installed the x64 version of the JRE 1.6.0 Update 7 from http://www.sun.com as directed by the Citrix XenApp 5.0 pop-up message. However, the Citrix XennApp 5.0 installer insisted the correct JRE was not installed. I uninstalled the x64 version of the JRE and installed the 32-bit version. This resolved the issue and Citrix XenApp installed properly.

Windows Activation and Change Product Keys do not work on Windows Server 2008

2008-10-01T10:01:00.000-04:00

I recently had an issue with the Activate Windows now and Change product key links in the System UI on Windows Server 2008 did not work. After some searching, I found the following Microsoft KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;929826.

This article describes how to use slmgr -ipk from the cmd prompt to change the product ID. Once this is done, run slui from the cmd prompt to launch the user interface for Windows Activation.