Thick-provisioned disk to thin, in ESX 4.1

On ESXi 4.1 Copying virtual machines machines using Veeam FastSCP (Free version), if the copied machine disk was thin-provisioned, the pasted machine will be thick, so one solution is use the following command

vmkfstools –i <srcDisk> -d thin <dstDisk>

but don't forget to edit the <dstDisk> to indicate <dstDisk-flat>

Recreating a missing virtual machine disk (VMDK) descriptor file

Powering on the virtual machine fails with the error: The file specified is not a virtual disk (15) or Recreating a missing virtual machine disk (VMDK) descriptor file follow links below from the VMware knowledge base

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1002511
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1016838

While following the steps, you may find the scsi controller is "lsisas1068" which is not supported as virtual controller in the command vmkfstools, so you can use "lsilogic" instead like I did with my Windows 2008 and it worked just fine.

HINT:
scsi0.virtualDev = "lsisas1068"
This new controller is only available with virtual hardware 7
it is a good choice for Windows 7 and 2008 R2

Windows Server 2008: Allow multiple Remote Desktop sessions per user

Remote Desktop/Terminal Services has two settings for multiple sessions. You can either allow multiple sessions per user (in which case if you log in twice, you'll get two sessions), or force a single session per user (in which case you can only log in once and subsequent sessions will be redirected to the original session.

To change this setting, you'll need to perform a registry change. The following steps describe the process:

1- Start Registry Editor (by default, this is located at c:\windows\regedit.exe).
2- Go to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\TerminalServer
3- If the fSingleSessionPerUser value doesn't exist, create a new DWORD value named fSingleSessionPerUser
4- Open the fSingleSessionPerUser value. The possible values for this setting are as follows:
0x0 -- Allow multiple sessions per user
0x1 -- Force each user to a single session
5- Enter the new setting, and then click OK.

Reference: http://www.thomasmaurer.ch/2010/10/windows-server-2008-allow-multiple-remote-desktop-sessions-per-user/