Posted on December 11th, 2008 by admin
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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Posted on December 1st, 2008 by admin
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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Posted on October 30th, 2008 by admin
Had a situation today where a customer asked me if I could monitor the APC UPS running his ESXi server. My plan was to install Powerchute on one of the Windows guest virtual machines running on the ESXi host and then use pass through to the comm port on the host, I’ve used this method before for ESX and VMware Server.
Unfortunately I discovered one of the things which is missing in ESXi is the ability do pass through to comm ports, I’d guess this is due to the service console component being removed in ESXi.
A solution would be to use an IP to Serial adaptor which plugs into a spare network point and connects to your serial device (UPS, Modem etc), you then install driver software into your guest Windows virtual machine which makes it appear as a local comm port, link to such a device is below:
IP to Serial adaptor
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Posted on October 14th, 2008 by admin
Sat my VMware VCP exam today, happy to say I passed with a score of 87. For those of you who went on the VMware Virtual Infrastructure course (a pre-requisite of taking the VCP-310 exam) some time ago, as I did, make sure you take time to learn the new features available in 3.5 , couple of question caught me out. Fairly tough exam compared to some of the Microsoft ones I’ve done, and lengthy at 60 questions.
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Posted on September 30th, 2008 by admin
Did some testing today with a Windows 2003 server running VMware Server and a Linux (Ubuntu) guest. The Linux guest already had tape backup software installed (BackupEdge) and needed to be able to access the tape drive (400GB LTO) on the Windows host. I knew this should work in theory but had never tried to do it before.
Installed the relevant drivers so the Windows host could see the tape drive, powered down the Linux guest and opened it’s settings in the VMware console. Added a generic SCSI device using Tape0 (see screenshot). Rebooted Linux guest and the backup software saw the tape drive straight away, tried test backup and verify all OK, can’t believe it was so easy to setup, had a Linux guru with me expecting us to spend hours trying to get it to work.
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Posted on September 20th, 2008 by admin
Despite the service console being removed in VMware ESXi an unsupported workaround can be used to enabled a limited CLI and SSH access to an ESXi host.
The procedure is as follows:
- From a screen and keyboard connected to the ESXi host press ALT+F1 keys
- Type: unsupported
- Type in your root password
- From the command prompt type vi /etc/inetd.conf
- Find the line which starts with #ssh
- Delete the # from the start of the line, (move the cursor over the # and press x).
- To save the file type :wq!
- Restart the ESX host.
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Posted on August 21st, 2008 by admin
Spent sometime today clarifying Microsoft’s stance on licensing Windows Servers as virtual machines, this applies regardless of which virtulisatuion platform the VM’s are running on e.g. VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, Hyper-V.
With standard Windows server licences you have to buy a licence for each VM running Windows Server as the guest OS.
With an enterprise licence you can run up to 4 VM’s under the same license on a single host.
With a datacenter license there is no limit on the number of virtual machines you can run per host.
The enterpise licence is probably going to be the most cost effective for SME’s who have a small number of virtualised servers.
I did ask the question of Microsoft what would happen if you had a pair of VMware ESX servers running 8 Windows VM’s, 4 on each host, using Windows enterprise licences. One of the ESX hosts fails and the 4 VM’s running on it are then powered up on the remaining host hence having 8 Windows VM’s running under the enterprise licence. The Microsoft guy said that technically nothing would stop this happening but you would be violating the licensing agreement.
I’ll let you decide what to do a.) Buy expensive datacenter licences or b.) Violate licence agreement whilst your failed host is being repaired, I think I already know most peoples decision. This same dilemma would also apply in ESX where VM’s could be moving between hosts using vmotion.
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Posted on July 14th, 2008 by admin
Tried to install a 64 bit Windows 2003 VM today, threw up an error when trying to power on the VM, turned out Intel-VT hadn’t been enabled in the BIOS of the ESX host which is required for 64 bit guest support.
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Posted on July 5th, 2008 by admin
Had and issue today with virtual machines running on an ESX host. the VM’s were exhibiting poor performance and relatively high CPU usage even when doing very little.
Problem was eventually traced to Intel-VT not being enabled in the ESX host BIOS, as soon as the ESX host had Intel-VT enabled in the BIOS performance increased and CPU usage on the VM’s dropped.
On HP server Intel-VT appears to be disabled by default.
The AMD equivalent of Intel-VT is called AMD-V, again make sure it is enabled in the BIOS.
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