Boot directly into BIOS - Workstation 8

In Workstation 8, there's a nice new little feature that let's you boot directly into BIOS from the power on button. Instead of having this option under edit settings it has been moved to the power on button itself.

A small thing perhaps, but quite practical.

Resizing disks in VMware Workstation

If you want to increase the size of a virtual machine (VM) in VMware Workstation, you can use the command line tool, vmware-vdiskmanager, from a command prompt. The command can be executed from the VMware Workstation folder under Program Files\VMware. The VM should be powered off.

The following command will increase the size of the virtual disk to 30 GB. In this case, the .vmdk file resides on a network share.

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Workstation>vmware-vdiskmanager -x 30GB "\\FILESERVER\folder-X\My Virtual Machines\testserver\testserver.vmdk"

This will work both on a disk where all space has been allocated and disk that are allowed to grow.

ESX 4.0 in Workstation - requires Intel-VT

I have been running ESX 3.5 and ESX 4.0 in VMware Workstation 6.5.1 for a while on my Lenovo T61 from work without any problems. A prerequisite for doing this, at least for ESX 4.0 (an probably also for Hyper-V) as it runs 64-bit, is that the CPU supports virtualisation mode - which in the Intel terminology is called Intel-VT - an which has to be enabled in the BIOS. The T61 is about one year old and has Intel-VT, so I thought that it was standard on all newer Intel processors. But oh-no, this is not the case. I recently purchased a Dell Studio 17 for private use with a Intel Core Duo 2 T6400 processor and I thought that I was in the good house. But - no Intel-VT support. Everything else was in order, 4 GB of memory, Windows 7 64-bit and so on. This was a bit disappointing. If your're looking to buy a new laptop, then check that this feature comes with the CPU. I found an article on ZDnet which lists a number of processors and wheather they have Intel-VT enabled.

The following has been copied from the ZDnet article. YES means that the CPU type supports Intel-VT:

Update: Here's a link to Intel's page with Intel-VT technology list