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Pre-release Microsoft OS/2 2.0 on ESXi

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While catching up on my RSS news feed over the weekend, I came across an interesting article titled: Ancient pre-release version of OS/2 2.0 discovered, released in VM-friendly packages and of course the VM-friendly packages caught my attention but I had never heard of or used OS/2 before.

From the article, a software archaeologist known as Neozeed shared a pretty unique experience of installing a pre-release version of Microsoft and IBM OS/2 2.0 ...

A software archaeologist known as Neozeed recently shared a pre-release version of OS/2 2.0, an ambitious PC operating system that Microsoft and IBM were developing together in the 1990s before the former decided to pursue the Windows route.

and this was made possible with the use of the free version of VMware Workstation Player, where they had attributed to the speed of Workstation Player:

VMware is incredibly fast, it's the #1 reason why I had done this.

which I thought was a really cool shoutout for VMware Desktop Hypervisor team!

Neozeed also published a complete video for installing and configuring Microsoft OS/2 using Workstation Player for those intersted:

While I do use VMware Fusion for my macOS desktop, I was curious if the OS/2 VM could also run in ESXi (hint: it does) and wanted to see what the steps would be to run this piece of history on the latest ESXi 8.0 Update 2b release 🙂

Step 1 - Download the Internet Archive OS/2 Workstation VM image that was created by Neozeed

Step 2 - Create a new MSoS2-6.78 directory under your ESXi datastore and upload all files (except for the VMDK, it may fail if you are using vSAN storage like I am)

Step 3 - SCP the MSOS2-6.78.vmdk into the same directory where the rest of the configuration files

Step 4 - Next, we need convert the desktop hypervisor VMDK format to one that ESXi by running the following command in the ESXi Shell:

vmkfstools -i MSOS2-6.78.vmdk -d thin MSOS2-6.78-NEW.vmdk

Step 5 - Register the OS/2 VMX file and then attach the newly created VMDK and finally power on the VM!


Note: For the best desktop experience, connect to OS/2 VM using the Standalone VMRC Client.

VMworld 2020 Demo - Voice activated workload migration to VMware Cloud SDDCs

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One of my favorite but also most stressful part of preparing for a VMworld session is creating the demos. Even with a "virtual" VMworld this year, I personally felt it was even more stressful than a physical VMworld.

I have been presenting with Emad Younis for a number of years now and every year, we always end up with crazy ideas without thinking through all the feasibility aspects. This year was certainly no different and while working on our demo this year, I was seriously questioning my sanity and even the actual return on investment (ROI), if such a thing exists!? 😂

In case you have not watched our session, check out HCP132: Planes, Trains and Workload Mobility, you can watch it for free and see the full demo.


I was really floored by all the positive feedback that we had received from attendees which includes the VMworld survey but also on Twitter and Slack. This was one of my favorite tweet and response 😀

We really appreciate all the feedback and it definitely made up for some of the late nights where I was about to give up. I know a few of you were asking for more details about the demo and so this blog post will be focusing on some of the information I was not able to get to during the VMworld session.

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My list of Microsoft Visual Code Studio Extensions

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I have been a huge fan of Microsoft Visual Code Studio since it was introduced to me about a year ago and has been my default editor of choice (outside of vi for quick edits and even Code has a vi extension which I had used for awhile but it had some quirks). Last week I had shared on Twitter a screenshot of all the extensions I personally use, since this was something I get asked about from time to time.


I had received a lot of positive feedback and I even learned about a few new extensions from a few folks. I figure I would provide the list of plugins I use as text which can then easily be searched directly in Code or via the Visual Studio Marketplace. Code itself supports a number of command-line options, including extension management and so I used the following command to generate the list of extensions I am currently using:

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