Macos on Matt Thornton

VMWare Fusion / Big Sur / Ubuntu / Black screen

Sat, 05 Dec 2020 20:15:59 +0000

Recently updated to macOS Big Sur. I’m not sure why I do this sort of thing quite so freely… I always naively assume everything will be OK. And so far, Big Sur vs Catalina is just a bit nightmare.

I’m sure there’s a huge amount of “don’t like change” in there but there are many things that are annoying the crap out of me with Big Sur. Calendar notifications for one. Gah.

But anyway, one real issue I have had was with VMware Fusion. I was previously on v11.something and when trying to launch a VM got greeted with “Host OS does not have enough physical memory to launch this VM” which was a complete load of bollocks. After a quick Google, it was evident it was a VMware incompatibility issue - Fusion 11 will not run on Big Sur and you must upgrade to VMWare 12. Yay. $100 later and I have Fusion 12 and… things are still broken. Main issue is that trying to start a VM results in a bunch of error messages… these seem to get resolved by changing the compatibility level of the VM…. but even then, starting the VM ends up in a black screen.

Eugh. Configuring Powershell for remote Exchange management

Tue, 19 May 2020 10:03:37 +0000

I use a mixture of Mac and Linux for most of my needs. I’ve run Windows virtual machines of same flavour or another but since .NET core 3 landed I’ve barely had to do even fire it up. There’s nowadays very little you can’t do in a non-Windows environment.

That doesn’t really extend (yet?) to remote administration of your Office365 tenant using Powershell.

I’m trying to configure some DNS bits for one of our domains that needs the Exchange Online V2 Powershell module. Come with me as I disappear down a rabbit hole of getting this working.

Migrate VMWare Fusion virtual machines to VMWare ESXi

Tue, 27 Nov 2018 12:21:23 +0000

Way back in 2012, I dabbled with ESXi. In fact, I faced then, moreorless the same problem I was facing a few days ago.

That particular ESXi server didn’t last particularly long - no technical issues, it just didn’t turn out to be the thing I wanted.

Fast forward 6 years, and I found myself in a new situation where having an ESXi host would be useful. We use Azure a lot nowadays, but there are still some scenarios where we’d like some on-premise kit such as developing against Sharepoint. (Although in fairness, I’m not sure anyone really ever *wants* to do that.) I digress.