virtual machine

Infopackets Reader Calli P. writes: " Dear Dennis, We are running one of our virtual machines on Virtualbox, but the performance is extremely lackluster and is very slow to respond, especially over a remote desktop session. I have read reports ... online that suggest VMware Workstation has nearly double the performance of Virtualbox and would like to migrate. After reading a few articles online, I tried exporting the Virtualbox VM to .OVA format (open virtualization format) in hopes of importing the single .OVA file into VMware Workstation, however, I get an error on VMware Workstation that says ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader William B. writes: " Dear Dennis, I am running a server virtual machine inside of Virtualbox and it's been quite slow. I've read that VMware Workstation has twice the performance (roughly). Out of curiosity, I tried to export my ... current virtual machine in Virtualbox using the Open Virtualization Format (.OVF or .OVA) but I get an error every time I try to export: ' Could not create the exported medium Server-disk001.vmdk (VERR_IO_CRC) .' I am not sure what to do and would like to export this virtual machine off of Virtualbox so I can give VMware Workstation a try. " My ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Calli P. writes: " Dear Dennis, I we just upgraded our server machine which includes all brand new hardware. The new server hardware will act as a Hypervisor, and are currently using Virtualbox to run our 'server' virtual machine. ... After copying over the server virtual machine to the new hardware, however, Virtualbox won't boot the virtual machine, stating ' Nonexistent host networking interface , name Intel I210 Gigabit Network Connection (VERR_INTERNAL_ERROR)', with an E_FAIL error 0x80004005 . I am not sure what to do and I need help! " My response: I asked Calli if she ... (view more)

(Note that the solution below applies to any Windows 11 machine that needs to stay up and running without a reboot after updates, and not just one running VMware Workstation). Infopackets Reader Calli P. writes: " Dear Dennis, We recently upgraded ... our server machine to an AMD Ryzen 9 with 16 cores and 32 threads. The old machine was very outdated (only 4 core). The role of the new server is the same as the old - to be a Hypervisor - which runs VMware workstation. Inside of VMware Workstation is a virtual machine which we regard as the Server virtual machine, which runs our ESC software for ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Calli P. writes: " Dear Dennis, We own a heating and cooling business and have a server that uses a Windows 10 virtual machine on VMware workstation. The virtual machine runs a program called ESC Connections Server that allows us ... to book appointments (among other things) from our workstations and also remotely on our phones. The ESC Server and virtual machine are both mission critical. That said, I understand that Windows 10 will only be supported until October, 2025 and would like to upgrade it to Windows 11. The problem is that our virtual machine was built using the MBR ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Steve J. writes: " Dear Dennis, I'm a certified PC tech and I have a lot of jobs where customers want to upgrade their PC to a new system. As part of the migration process, I convert the client's old physical machine to a virtual ... machine using VMWare Converter. Once that is completed, I copy the virtual machine to the new PC and run it. The virtual machine serves two functions: 1) it's essentially a 'live' backup of the old machine, and 2) users can export their data from the virtual machine (example: bookmarks from a web browser) to the new machine in ways that a regular ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Steve G. writes: " Dear Dennis, I run a small business and we use Virtualbox to control our virtual server (Windows Server 2016). We had a hardware problem with the hypervisor machine, forcing us to copy the virtual server onto ... another machine temporarily for a week. Now that we're done fixing the hypervisor machine, it's time to move the virtual server back over. The problem is that I get an error message from Virtualbox stating that " Cannot start virtual machine because the following physical network interfaces were not found ... (etc)" It then gives the option to " ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Bill G. writes: " Dear Dennis, My question is about how to compact a VHD file (virtual disk). I recently virtualized an old Windows 2016 server and am using Virtualbox as my hypervisor. In the process of updating and configuring ... the virtual machine, I created 3 snapshots (live backups) in case I needed to undo changes. The .VHD is the Server 2016 C Drive and was originally only 60GB - however, I noticed that the 'snapshots' folder has grown to a massive 168GB! I went into virtual machine's snapshot window and deleted all the snapshots, hoping to free up space on the disk ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Paul K. writes: " Dear Dennis, We use VMWare Workstation 14 at work as the hypervisor for a number of virtual machines that run on our server. A few days ago we lost power on the server while our database virtual machine (VM) was ... running. I have since tried to start that virtual machine, but VMWare Workstation keeps popping up with an error message that says ' This virtual machine might have been moved or copied (pic). In order to configure certain management and networking features, VMWare Workstation needs to know if this virtual machine was moved or copied. If you don't ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Steve G. writes: " Dear Dennis, I just read your article on How to Fix: Computer / Network Infected with Ransomware (10 Steps) and it was incredibly informative. I hope I never get infected with ransomware! That said, I have seen ... software products and services advertised online claiming they can prevent ransomware, but the information is often obscure. I feel like I am none the wiser. Even searching Google for ' how to prevent ransomware ' points to a very short article on Norton's website, which then links to Norton Antivirus. In your previous article, you said Norton didn ... (view more)