“Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart” (Installing Windows Server 2012 on VMware ESXi 5.0)

Preparing somewhat for the upcoming Microsoft Beta Exams (071-413, 071-414, 071-415 and 071-416) thinking I would go ahead and install Microsoft Windows Server 2012 into my testing environment which is VMWare ESXi (at the moment). I created a custom VM, removed the Floppy drive (because that seemed to be the issue not getting Windows 8 working within VMware Workstation 8). I did do some other standard stuff like selecting Windows Server 2008 (64-bit) instead of Windows Server 2008 R2 (That seemed part of the solution on Workstation). All this to no avail on VMWare ESXi 5.0.

The resolution for me was to patch the VMware ESXi 5.0 server to Build 768111 which is up to 5.0.0 Patch 7.

I like the new fun error message though … Hope it will last beyond RC level, Microsoft should do more fun stuff like this, and I don’t mean more error messages .

Installing Citrix Branch Repeater into VMware Workstation

I hope I don’t need to explain that this is for testing/evaluating purposes only and is not at all supported by Citrix in any way.  You would have to be pretty creative to think of a network testing solution to get this working in a VMware Workstation setup. Basically you would need two of these VPX appliances and figure out how to flow the data between the two Citrix Branch Repeaters with on one end Citrix XenApp Servers or XenDesktop machines and some sort of client on the other.

But if you want get more acquainted with the Citrix Branch Repeater command line interface or the GUI this is a nice way of doing that.

In this guide I will only show how to get a working Citrix Branch Repeater VPX into VMware Workstation VM.

Materials used for this:
- Citrix Branch Repeater VPX 6.0.5;
- VMware OVF Tool 2.1.0;
- VMware Workstation 8;
- WinRAR.

Download Citrix Branch Repeater VPX 6.0.5 from the Citrix download section on www.citrix.com, this requires an active MyCitrix login account.