VMware Fusion cannot connect to the virtual machine

After having a MacBook pro crash and subsequently get repaired with a new logic board, we found that the virtual machines on the computer would not start at all. This problem started happening just before the computer fatally crashed before needing repair, but persisted after the logic board was replaced. The exact error VMware Fusion 2 gave us was, “Make sure you have rights to run the program and to access all directories it uses and rights to access all directories for temporary files”. Many solutions to this problem involve removing and reinstalling VMware Fusion.

After uninstalling, deleting the remaining files and rebooting then reinstalling the latest version a few times (even as different users) we found that we had the exact same problem. We even tried reinstalling again using an older version of Fusion (version 1). We ran the verify and repair on both the disk and permissions with no success either.

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Removing the hiberfil.sys

By default Windows Vista and Server 2008 have a hibernation file equal to the size of the amount of memory you are using. Of you have 12GB of RAM, that will be a 12GB hiberfil.sys. If you are using a small SSD, that would be a killer waste. Removing this file is a quick way to free up HD space, although considering how cheap drives are, you could always upgrade. Furthermore if you are using a virtual machine, you probably don’t need this space wasted either.

Now I do not know why they do this on the Server version since who hibernates a server (that being said I am sure some people probably do, silly tree huggers). The real bugger with this problem is that shutting off hibernation does not always remove the hiberfil.sys file. Alternatively, what if you want to remove it without needing to reboot the server. I found a very fast and simple way to do this is to launch a command prompt as an administrator and run the following command:

powercfg.exe /hibernate off

The other way is to run the disk clean up utility, this will disable hibernation and delete the hiberfil.sys. Instructions on doing this are here.

New Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances

The good folks at Amazon have announced a new pricing scheme called a Reserved Instance to complement the On Demand instance. For a low one time payment, and about 20% of the instance hour cost, you can reserve capacity on 1 or 3 year terms. If you want to tie yourself into a long term contract but have a significantly reduced rate resulting in savings, this is the option for you.

For a standard instance, on a per use basis you will pay approximately $880 for one year. Using the new reserved instance, you will pay about $580 for a savings of around $300. These are just rough estimates, but a reserved instance saves you around 30-50% versus On Demand instances.  The longer the term, the better your savings.  You will save $1300 on a 3 year term deal against an on demand instance running for 3 years straight.
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Costs Using Amazon EC2 & S3

Figuring out all the costs when hosting on EC2 using S3 storage can be tricky. This is break down of what you can approximately expect to pay using a few basic scenarios, such as a lamp server and S3 backups, with Amazon services. This will also compare the costs to what you would expect to pay if you want to do the hosting yourself.

To fully understand EC2 charges, you need to know the difference between the instance types and what they cost to best meet your requirements. For the purpose of this post I will summarize – I have converted the Amazon Compute Units into basic CPU power and will then detail the costs based upon each of these instances.
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Scalr.net simple management for EC2 instances

At my work we have been experimenting with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and come to the point that we wanted to build a scalable application on it and not have to micro manage all of the instances.   Enter Scalr.net, the simple way to manage EC2 instances and make them easily scale.  Everything has been mostly painless, and any problems were quickly resolved with their excellent support.   It was much simpler getting an instance up and running  with Scalr than via Amazon’s various  command line tools.

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