Virtualisation

On several occasions have received a ‘Fatal Error’ when trying to install Integration Components  into a Hyper-V Virtual Machine.

This seems to happen when upgrading from a previous version or in my test lab when I have been doing some P2V testing.

Uninstalling Hyper-V Guest Components using Add/Remove programs doesn’t fix problem.

Only way I’ve found to fix problems is to delete the following 2 files (recommend doing a snapshot first just in case).

C:\Windows\system32\drivers\wdf01000.sys and  C:\Windows\system32\drivers\wdfldr.sys

You should then be able to install Integration Components.

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One of the interesting things coming up in VMware Infrastructure 4 or vSphere as it is now known is the new licensing options aimed at securing a bigger slice of the lucrative SME marketplace.

Many SME’s were put off on the pricing of VMware Infrastructure 3 with Enterprise and Virtual Centre licences for a couple of ESX hosts not leaving you much change out of £10k.

vSphere will introduce an essentials and essentials plus which will offer a reduced feature set compared to the higher end vSphere offerings. Link below shows vSphere version comparison chart.

vSphere version comparison

Although the essentials plus offering has VMware HA it is missing vMotion, DRS and the newly introduced vSphere fault tolerance, which I feel is a bit strange considering the essentials package covers licensing for 3 ESX hosts. Microsoft will include their vMotion equivalent for Hyper-V in Windows 2008 R2 so could make the essentials package a little less attractive to customers who are looking for the ability to live migrate VM’s between hosts.

Pricing for the essentials plus package is showing as $2995, this includes licenses for 3 physical hosts and vCentre Server for essentials to handle management.

Release date stated as May 21st .

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Software company Veeam have today released v3 of their free FastSCP program which now supports coping files to and from ESXi hosts without any hacking or modification required on ESXi.

The solution is able to copy powered off virtual machines to or from a Windows machine, jobs can be scheduled if required.

On testing managed a very respectable performance of 28 MB/s from an ESXi host running SATA disk across a gigabit network, certainly faster than any other solution I’ve seen for ESXi.

For those of you looking for a backup solution for VMware Virtual Infrastructure they also do a pay solution called Veeam Backup which rivals Vizioncores backup solution.

www.veeam.com

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So you’ve loaded Hyper-V, created your virtual machine and loaded Windows server onto the virtual machine.  You are using remote desktop to connect to your Hyper-V host and power  on the virtual machine.

The first thing you’ll notice when you try to use the mouse is that you’ll receive the message popup “Mouse not captured in Remote Desktop Session”, and instead of a mouse pointer will just get a dot in it’s place. Have noticed when using  3rd party remote control software, logmein in my case I was able to see a mouse pointer but still not control it.

This is really frustrating for those of  us who have used VMware where the mouse works straight away (albeit jerky until VMware tools installed).

The way to get the mouse working under a Hyper-V VM is to install  Microsoft Virtual Machine Integration Services into the VM.  As you have no mouse you will need to use the keyboard to login and start the install, a list of common windows key combinations is shown below. Once logged in from the VM connection window click on the ‘Actions’ menu and select ‘Insert Integration Services Setup Disk’ from the drop down list, this will load the install disk into the virtual CD drive of your VM from where the install can be started.  Once installed you’ll get control of your mouse back.

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I’d tried VMware server 2 back in beta but found I couldn’t get on with the new management web interface so stuck with my trusted VMware server 1.0.x

A colleague mentioned recently VMware Server 2 could be managed using the familair VI client usually used to manage ESX hosts.

Sure enough after downloading and installing the latest version of VMware server 2 was able to connect to it using VI client by pointing it to the server IP on port 8333  , in my case VI client was running on the same machine as VMware server so pointed the VI client to 127.0.0.1:8333 , used my Windows login name and password and bingo managing VMware server using VI client, I’m finally happy to upgrade to VMware Server 2.

If you don’t already have VI client installed you can download it by pointing your web browser to to the IP of your VMware server host using the URL:

https://127.0.0.1:8333/client/VMware-viclient.exe

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If you are running ESX or ESXi U2 or above and have an application that creates VMware backups using snapshots (e.g Vizioncore , Veeam ) you may notice sometimes you are left with a snapshot called Consolidated Helper Snapshot followed by a number.

If you try to remove the snapshot on a powered on VM it will fail (hangs at 95% ) and you may find that when you right click the virtual machine in VI client you can no longer power off the virtual machine and most of the other settings are greyed out.

Saw this happen to a VM running on an ESXi host after aborting a backup script, only thing I could do was reboot the ESXi host and remove the snapshot whilst the VM was powered off, all OK then.

These helper snapshots from what I can determine are designed to reduce the impact of VM snapshots locking a live VM but may occasionally not get removed correctly after the removal of the main VM snapshot.

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During install of vmware tools on newly p2v’d server error 1606 was displayed and vmware tools would not install.

Error ocured as location of administrators My Documents had been redirected to a network location which could not be accessed as no network driver installed.

If you are unable to change the path of the My Documents folder to the local profile path due to group policy lockdown, you can change it in the registry by going to the key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders

Change the values for the personal and My Pictures keys to the user local path for example “C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents”.

VMware tools should then install OK.

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Received this error today trying to create a new snapshot of a Windows VM guest running on VMware ESXi. VI client showed no existing snapshots, tried reboot of VM and ESXi host but still unable to create a new snapshot.

Was eventually able to create the snapshot by renaming the snapshot definition file for the VM, this then allowed me to create snapshots OK.

To rename the file browse to the datastore containing the VM folder using the VI client and look for a file ending in .vmsd (will probably be your_vm_name.vmsd), you can then right click on the file and rename adding a .bak to the end of the file name (e.g. orginal file called server1.vmsd renamed file server1.vmsd.bak).

Only try this technique if you are 100% sure you have no existing snapshots on the virtual machine as peforming the above on a VM with snapshots will undoubtedly break it !!

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During a visit to Microsoft today had a demo of clustering Hyper-V.  Demo environment consisted of 2 Windows 2008 servers attached to an ISCSI target with 2 disks, one operating as the data disk where the virtual machine will reside, the 2nd disk acted as the quorum disk for the cluster.

One thing I was impressed with was how much the clustering in 2008 server has been simplified nice wizard based setup.  Once the cluster was up and running the person giving the demo powered off the host which was running the virtual machine, after a short time the clustering kicked in a the disk containing the virtual machine was disconnected from the failed host, reconnected to the 2nd host and finally the VM was powered back up.  The VM came back up in a dirty state as the power was pulled but assuming the OS or data was not corrupted offers protection against hardware failure of a Hyper-V host.

Microsoft announced that there weould be some enhancements made to Hyper-V in 2008 server R2, something to do with allowing both hosts to access the same disk akin to what is possible using VMware and their VMFS file system.

Microsoft then just need to add memory state migration and they’re heading to a VMware vmotion type solution.

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You can use the free VMware converter tool to import Microsoft virtual machines into VMware. Most of the Microsoft product line can be downloaded for evaluation in a pre configured virtual machine format. Microsoft virtual machines come with a virtual disk with a file extension of VHD and configuration file with the extension VMC, VMware uses VMDK for the virtual disk and VMX for the configuration file.

You can use VMware converter to convert the image to run on either VMware Server / Workstation or directly to an ESX/ESXi host.

Don’t choose to install VMware tools as part of the conversion as this conflicts with Microsoft’s own virtual machine enhancements (MS Virtual Machine Additions) and will probably stop your mouse working. Instead do a manual install of VMware Tools after the conversion but choose not to install the VMware mouse driver.

If you have installed VMware tools and stopped the mouse working then you could try the following:

Using regedit go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Class\{4D36E96F-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
remove the value msvmmouf from the UpperFilters Regvalue and reboot your virtual machine.

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