VMware offers many appliances for their products. Unfortunately they are not all created equally. The installation and configuration procedures differ for most appliances and also the default usernames and passwords are different throughout the range of appliances. So here is a list of default usernames and passwords. For as far as I know them, if you miss one please let me know and I will add it to this list.

When your hard disk in a VM is too small it is easy to increase the hard disk size. This article guides you through the necessary steps. We start with a VM running Windows 7 that has a 45GB hard disk. See the image below.

The purpose of this article is to explain how to use Microsoft SQL Express to create a database server for the VMware Horizon View Event Database and the Composer database. In a production environment you should use one of the supported databases (MS-SQL or Oracle). But when setting up a proof of concept or a test environment (for example for educational purposes) a SQL Express database will also suffice.

This article addresses two questions. The first one is: How can I force a time synchronization poll? And the second one is: How can I verify if the NTP-daemon is actually synchronizing with an NTP-server?

I have not found a command to force synchronization (if you know of one please let me know). But a way to do this is to restart the NTP-daemon, once it is loaded it will start with an initial poll and then remains running. To restart the daemon from the ESXi command line run this command: