Monday 21 March 2011

Slow mouse performance on Windows 2008 R2 virtual machine

Troubleshooting SVGA drivers installed with VMware Tools on Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 running on ESX 4.0

■You receive a black screen on the virtual machine when using Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 as a guest operating system on ESX 4.0.
■You experience slow mouse performance on Windows 2008 R2 virtual machine.
Solution

This issue can occur due to the XPDM (SVGA) driver provided with VMware Tools. This is a legacy Windows driver and is not supported on Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 guest operating systems.


To resolve this issue, update to ESX 4.0 Update 1. A new WDDM driver is installed with the updated VMware Tools and is compatible with Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2.


Note: After a VMware Tools upgrade, the driver files are located in.

C:\Program Files\Common Files\VMware\Drivers\wddm_video.

Monday 14 March 2011

Dell R610 - Tylersburg chipset stepping for Westmere processors

Tylersburg chipset stepping for Westmere processors
Introduction of the new Intel Xeon 5600 series (Westmere-EP) processors includes a stepping revision of the Intel 5520 and 5500 chipset from ‘B3’ to ‘C2’. This stepping revision is required to enable the full Xeon 5600 processor feature set. Dell servers shipped with the new chipset revision will have the symbol II in the BIOS System Revision Field, which is visible through Open Manage Server Administrator (OMSA) and the iDRAC GUI. In addition, these servers will be physically marked with a 12mm wide by 6mm tall rectangular label containing the symbol “II” will be. They will be white characters on a black background.
The II symbol also identifies R610 servers with system boards that support 130W processors. 130W processors on R610 require a unique heatsink.PowerEdge R610 (Thidwick) Sourcebook Dell Confidential – For Internal Use Only 35
Intel Xeon 5600 series processors will work in existing systems built for Intel Xeon 5500 series (Nehalem-EP), however the full feature set including AES-NI encryption and Intel TXT will only be available in newly manufactured systems which include the new Westmere-EP (C2) stepping of the system chipset. In addition, existing systems will not support the top bin 130W Xeon 5600 processors.
A BIOS and iDRAC update to current versions are required before installing 5600 series processors in systems originally shipped with Nehalem EP 5500 series processors.