Finding the vAnswers

In VMware documentation, we show you how a product works, and how you can use the product to accomplish your tasks. But what about when the product isn't working for you—when it doesn't behave as described in the manual, or when the manual doesn't cover a problem you encounter, or a special task you want to perform? In our procedures we try to anticipate every use case, and in our troubleshooting sections we try to foresee everything that might go wrong, but with the large and growing base of VMware users, it's impossible to cover every situation that might occur. Every user is unique, and the number of variations—in combinations of hardware, operating systems, and use cases—is practically limitless.

One of the best resources for troubleshooting problems is the VMware Knowledge Base. Maintained by VMware Global Support Services team, the Knowledge Base (KB) contains thousands of articles authored by GSS support techs, product development and QA engineers, and Technical Communications writers. KB articles specialize in corner cases, troubleshooting, workarounds, and more. Thorny, corner-case problems are usually solved only through considerable effort, collaboration, and head pounding by some very smart and knowledgeable people. KB articles document those solutions, so no one should have to struggle with solving the same problems again.

And note: when you search the Knowledge Base, you're searching not only KB articles, but also the library of product documentation and discussion threads in VMware Communities. This makes the Knowledge Base a great place to begin looking for answers.

So how do you use the Knowledge Base? Just go to http://kb.vmware.com/ and you'll find that it's pretty self-explanatory. You can browse or search by keyword, and you can filter the search by product. And if you need more detailed instructions or help, the Knowledge Base itself is well documented (just as you would expect) in a KB article—just click the Knowledge Base Help button in the upper right of the KB home window.

I will add one tip for searching: when I enter search terms, I start by trying to identify as uniquely as I can the symptoms and setup of the problem I've encountered—I might include the essential words of an error message, the operating system version of the VM, what seemed to trigger the problem—whatever might help filter the search to the results most likely to match my problem exactly. I err on the side of inclusiveness, using as many relevant keywords as I can. Sometimes, I get lucky and find my problem on the first try. More likely, I get no results, or just a few. So I start deleting terms, one by one, from the search. With every deletion, the search broadens, and I get more results to scan through.

One more note: be sure to take a look at the navigation bar on the right-hand side of the KB home page, where there are links to some other really great tools and services provided by the KB team, including:

• answer wizards, which walk you through the troubleshooting of various common problems
• KBTV, an ongoing series of how-to videos
• the Weekly KB Digest, where you can check for the newest additions to the Knowledge Base
• the The Support Insider blog

You can also subscribe to KBTV, the Weekly Digest and the KB Blog via RSS, and you can follow the Knowledge Base on Twitter: @VMwareKB.

In short, whenever you need vAnswers, try the Knowledge Base. It's a terrific resource, and my hat's off to the GSS team that produces it.

Most of our docs are available in PDF and HTML formats. If you access our in-product help or find our docs by searching the Web on a specific topic, you are more likely to get an HTML version of the documentation. (For info on getting the PDF version of a doc, see my earlier post "VMware Doc Formats—Can I Get a PDF?")

Occasionally we get feedback on our HTML-based documentation like the following email: "This topic explains what a clone is, but not how to actually clone the machine! Where are the instructions for cloning?" In cases like this, I know users have found a single HTML page from our larger help or manual doc, and can't figure out how to navigate from that page to the page they want. So here's a little help about our help.

Our HTML-based docs are generated by a conversion engine that turns our source doc files into HTML, and creates a frame-based superstructure with a navigation pane, a topic pane, and some buttons for getting around in the docset. Depending on your VMware product and version, and on how you access a HTML doc topic (through the Help menu, by searching the Web, or by opening an HTML doc from the documentation page of our Web site), you may not see the entire frameset, but only the topic, without the navigation pane. Or, the navigation pane may be visible, but it's not clear to you where the current topic is in the helpset, or how to navigate to a more useful topic.

So I put together a little video to help you use our HTML-based documentation. I hope this helps.

If the video is not showing up in your browser, you can view it directly in YouTube at this URL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I7qGQktbqk

Among the truly great features of Workstation, Player, and VMware Fusion is the ability to share text and images between the host and guest or between virtual machines by simply dragging and dropping or copying and pasting. As wonderful as this ability is, it does have its limits and restrictions. From time to time, we get feedback from users who are having trouble using the drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste features and can't figure out why. This post assembles the best wisdom from VMware documentation on these features.

The shared folders feature provides a great way to share files between virtual machines and the host computer—you can designate folders on your computer that you can see and use from within your virtual machines. We occasionally get feedback from users who are having problems setting up and using shared folders. If you're having problems using shared folders, here are a few things to check:

From time to time, we get feedback from users who are having trouble connecting to or using printers from their VMware Fusion virtual machines. Here are some excerpts from the help, Knowledge Base articles, and Communities to collect the best answers for VMware Fusion printer issues.

I'm just back from vacation, and digging myself out from under my emails, so just a quick post today to answer a simple but important doc feedback question that came in recently: "I found a great deal of useful information in the Resource Management Guide & the VI3.5 Server Configuration guide. Is it at all possible to obtain a pdf format?" The short answer is yes.

You can get nearly all VMware product documentation in PDF format, as well as in our online HTML-based format. But you may be one of the many users who find VMware docs by searching the Web, in a search engine such as Google. If that's the case, you might find only a relevant page from the online HTML version of the doc you want. What if you want to view, download, or print the whole doc?

Easy. Go to the VMware documentation page: http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/, and navigate to the doc page for your product—in this case, the VI3 page for ESX 3.5 and vCenter Server 2.5. On the doc page, you can choose the format you want. Most docs are provided in both PDF and HTML versions. (The HTML version is often listed as an "online library.") Docs available in PDF will either have the text "PDF" after the link, or the PDF logo:   

And a tip: you can simply click the link to open the PDF in your browser, but I prefer right-clicking or Ctrl-clicking the link to download the PDF. PDFs often display and print more quickly and reliably when you work with a local copy of the file in Adobe Acrobat Reader than when you view them in a browser.

Keyboard-related issues come up from time to time in using VMware Fusion virtual machines, since Fusion users' keyboards vary so (Mac, Windows, querty, azerty, and more). Here are some excerpts from the docs and Communities to collect the best answers for keyboard issues. There are many more keyboard issues in Community threads — see the three-part post Finding vAnswers in VMware Communities for specific instructions and tips on searching Communities and posting questions there.

In part 1 of this post, we took a quick look at using VMware Community discussion forums to find the answer to a user's doc feedback question. In part 2, we tried using the Google Search instead of the default Communities search. In both cases, we were looking to see whether someone had already answered our question in the forums. In this post, we'll explore posting your own query.

In part 1 of this post, we took a quick look at using VMware Community discussion forums to find the answer to a user's doc feedback question. In this post, we'll look at another way to search the forums.

Here's a doc feedback email we received recently: "I am running Windows XP in Fusion on my iMac. For the past 10 months it has been flawless, but now it's locked at 'Windows is Shutting Down'. I can't seem to get it to restart with a Ctrl-Alt-Delete command or a reboot. Can you please tell me how to fix this problem?"

As is often the case with our feedback emails, it's more of a support request than feedback on our docs (though, as always, we have to ask ourselves why the user didn't find the answer in the help). As it turns out (also often the case), this question has been asked and answered in the VMware Fusion Community discussions.

I thought this would be a good case to illustrate how to find vAnswers in VMware Communities. For those of you not yet familiar with the Communities, they are a great resource when you have a specific problem not covered in the product help or user's manual. (The knowledge base is another great resource, but that will be the subject of another post.)