When downloading a few Virtual Appliances I’ve found they haven’t had network connectivity ‘out of the box’. I’ve only noticed this with Ubuntu servers so far but admittedly I haven’t downloaded a lot of other flavors!

This appears to be because the MAC address for eth0 is different to the one of the creators VMware Server. Using the following command you’ll notice eth1 is seen instead:

ifconfig -a

I then just simply copied the MAC address shown and updated the MAC address listed against eth0 in /etc/iftab. Then restart the server.

The vmware-vdiskmanager.exe that comes with VMware Server can defrag and shrink your virtual drives.. But to make life easier check out these automated BAT files someones written to help out with the tasks. But remember not run this on VM’s that have snapshots!!