Today I was tasked with removing a snapshot from VMware Server. Easy enough to do power down the server and select delete snapshot. This in turn merges the snapshot to the original flat file and this is where todays fun started.

I shut the server down and after a quick read of the help file selected delete snapshot. everything was going well until...



Oh dear. I tried connecting again to be given the error message "There was a problem connecting - 511 vmware-serverd service is not running."

Oh dear times two at this point. I take a look in the directory where the vmdk files and the snapshot files are kept. I notice that ennsys02-C.000001 has gone missing but ennsys02-D.000001 is there.

I check the processor and memory usage on the host nothing is spiking, at this point I'm a nervous rack thinking I've hosed the VM - minutes tick past as I wonder if I should restart the services or if the D drive snapshot is actually being merged.

After a lot of thought I release this could be the same type of time out message that the VI client for ESX will provide after 15 minutes of deleting a snapshot. I leave the scene for 15 minutes and come back to find that all snapshots have now merged and in their place there are 1.5 meg C: and 4.7 meg D: drive snapshots.

I wait for another few minutes and notice that they are still there. I go back to the VMware Server Client and try to login when I'm prompted again with the error message "There was a problem connecting - 511 vmware-serverd service is not running." Bugger!

I spent the next few minutes clock watching as the server has around 19 minutes before it has to be online.

I check event logs and nothing! I check VM services and they are all running I even ensured all VMware exe's where running they were. Knowing the server has to be up in a few minutes I decide the best option is to take an educated guess and restart the services for VMware.

I started with VMware Registration Service - open the client and I’m straight in! Once I got logged in the VM had already started to load up with the two snapshot files still there.. bollocks!

I shut the VM down quickly delete the rest of the Snapshot files and bingo! we're back online. phew.

Today I encountered a strange problem – windows search was returning no results now on a single pc this is an annoyance but on 2 terminal servers (citrix 4.5 PS) with 20+ users on each this was starting to create issues.

After looking at all settings for searching etc I narrowed the problem down to the fact that no one seemed to have the “include subfolders” box ticked. Not a problem I say tick it on one close Windows search only to go in and find out it’s now unticked again. Starting to get strange looks from the customer I explained it was a search setting that only administrators can configure and to leave it to me.

I returned back to the server room to go through all of the settings for searching once again to no avail. I Googled, I looked on Experts exchange I even looked at a few news groups but no one seems to have had this problem before and if they have they clearly haven’t put anything about it online!

I noticed that my own search(as a domain admin) had “include subfolders” ticked – a simple reg search later revealed that there was a REG_DWORD value on my hive reg settings.

I took note of this value (IncludeSubFolders - REG_DWORD – 0x00000001 (1) )

I opened both terminal server registry’s and inserted the above reg value in to the following locations:

HKEY_USERS
.DEFAULT
Software
Microsoft
Windows
CurrentVersion
Explorer

I got a user to log off and log on and to my amazement the box was ticked! Even better I unticked it closed search and reopened it and it was still ticked!! Awesome!