Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between
My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together
Category Archives: Mac
Shortcut key for CTRL-ALT-DEL on a Mac for a Fusion VM
Posted by on April 19, 2011
Apologies if this is old-hat or obvious but I didn’t realize you could do this until recently – if you have a Windows VM and want to press CTRL-ALT-DEL to logon or bring up the lock screen etc. there isn’t an obvious shortcut key as the Mac doesn’t have a physical DEL key like a normal PC keyboard, so if you’re a Fusion user you can hit the Fusion bar and choose to send CTRL-ALT-DEL to the guest OS.
However if you hit Fn-CTRL-ALT and Backspace on the Mac keyboard it has the same effect and sends CTRL-ALT-DEL to the guest (a 4-finger salute, rather than the traditonal 3-finger salute 
).
Importing a PST file into Outlook 2011 for Mac
Posted by on October 4, 2010
I have been a long-term Outlook user and I’m a serial information hoarder 🙂 so I have a calendar and contact set that goes back a LONG way in time, in a previous life I was also an Exchange/AD consultant so I see the benefits of a server-side mailbox store (centrally held data with local disposable replicas, search, access anywhere etc.).
As well as my work schedule it has all my regular personal appointments, kids school schedules etc. – for simplicity’s sake I only keep one calendar, I don’t have a separate work and personal calendar – your mileage may vary, but this is the way I work.
Having recently moved companies and moved from Wintel/Office to a Mac with the new Outlook 2011 I needed a way of importing my PST-archived calendar to my new Exchange store (calling it a mailbox doesn’t seem to do it justice anymore as it contains calendar, contacts, etc as well now).
I also use a BES-connected Blackberry so I want it to sync my calendar to my device via the BES and a server-side calendar means it’s accessible using OWA from any PC.
This is pretty straightforward for normal Windows Outlook as you just import the .PST and choose the new server-side store/calendar as the target.
However, it seems that the built-in import function in Outlook 2011 won’t import calendar data from a .PST file directly to an Exchange server-side store, it will import it but it only keep it in a separate locally held calendar, nor can you cut & paste or sync or do anything to move the contents from “calendar – on my computer” into the server-side calendar.
My “VMware calendar” (note: not my capitalization :)) is the server-side one but I can’t import directly to it, it always goes into “On my computer” which I can only assume is held somewhere client-side.
Whilst I can select both (as shown above) and they get overlaid on the calendar view this is only accessible when I use my Mac and thus won’t be available via OWA, or on my Blackberry.
So – the only solution I found was to use a Windows VM under Fusion with Office 2010 installed and use it to import my calendar contents, thus it synced back down to my Outlook 2011 offline store and onwards to my Blackberry via the BES.
This seemed a sort of backwards process so I would love to know if anyone has found a better native way to do this….?
High CPU utilization with Windows XP SP3 guest under VMware Fusion
Posted by on April 23, 2009
I have had a curious problem recently, I am currently running Windows XP under Fusion on a MacBook Pro; since I did some software updates recently the fan was going crazy and running at up to 6000 RPM even when apparently idling not only was the noise annoying it seemed to eat battery power.
Handy utility here for monitoring Mac temperature and fan speed.
With a bit of investigation I found that the Windows Search service was installed whilst I did some updates to the XP VM – it was doing it’s initial indexing the C: drive of the VM in the background – as soon as I disabled the “Windows Search” service it used much less CPU, and as a result quieter, cooler and the battery now lasts longer 🙂
Luckily I had no real use for Windows Search in this VM, but if you are experiencing the same problem worth looking into what background services are running in your guest OS and remembering that higher CPU usage = more heat = faster fan.
Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between 