Expand your vmware disks

I have used VMware Workstation and - Viewer for testing, development, deployment and maintenance during quite a few years. Great product for this.

From time to time I have been in need of expanding the disks on the virtual machine as they have been almost out of free space. With VMware it's quite easy to do using the free standalone Converter.

With VMware vCenter Converter you can take copies of your virtual machine and change the disksize during the process.

There's a few steps where you need to pay attention otherwise the process is straight forward

  • Select source
  • Let the converter read the configuration
  • Choose destination
  • And alter the options a little ...

The converter suggest "Copy all disks and maintain layout", change this to "Select volumes to copy" and you can set new disksize for each disk.

Type the new disksize in GB and watch while the converter does the all the hard work or go and grab a cop of coffee while you're waiting

Installing BlogEngine RC 2.0

It's fairly stragiht forward to install BlogEngine, just follow the instructions ind the readme files and you're fine. Remember to set filepermissions on the app_data folder, files and sub folders etc.

If you're running in a hosted enviroment you might encounter an error: "unable to generate a temporary class". After some poking around on the internet I found that the XmlSerializer just might be the cause of the and I also found a quick and easy fix

As the asp.net windows user probably does not have the prober rights to create files in the windows temp folder. Solution is to point the XmlSerializer to another folder for storing files/classes on the fly

Change temp folder

In the web.config I added this section

<system.xml.serialization>
    <xmlSerializer tempFilesLocation="d:\websites\blognet.web\app_data\temp"/>
</system.xml.serialization>

Obviously "d:\websites\blognet.web\app_data\temp" should reflect the correct path to your installation of BE
The method Request.PhysicalApplicationPath should give you a fairly good idea
NB! My installation has a different path too :)

All credits for this solution goes to http://www.hanselman.com/blog/changingwhere%20xmlserializeroutputstemporaryassemblies.aspx