I was excited to see VMware Fusion released last week, since I missed getting into the private beta. It was a fairly large download, about the size as VMware Workstation. After the painless installation process, I copied over some of my template VMDKs for Windows XP and Server 2003 to my MacBook so I could get going as soon as possible. I started up VMware Fusion, nice interface, very clean. Now to get down to business.

I didn’t get very far. To get Fusion working at this point as intended, you must do a CD install. I’ll probably do that at some point, but.. what a bummer.

The “New Virtual Machine” wizard was a bit too friendly for me, and didn’t offer any custom or advanced choice. It felt like the old Virtual PC for PowerPC Macs. No option to connect a template drive to the new virtual machine like I can do in VMware Workstation. Oh well, I thought I would just create a blank drive and edit the virtual machine once it’s created.

Nope, the virtual machine configuration editor is essentially useless. All the options “will be editable in a future release.” No way to attach my template VMDKs. It appears that I could edit the VMX file manually, but that’s a lot of extra work! You also get a warning about debug mode, which was enabled on VMware Server.

I plan to use Fusion in my presentations instead of bringing an extra notebook to connect to the projector, I hope it becomes more functional before mid February!

Update: I took my blank VM, renamed the blank VMDK file and replaced it with my template Windows XP VMDK by renaming the template to the old file name and placing it in the virtual machine’s folder. I booted it up and it worked like a charm.

For the last 2 days we were having network connectivity trouble with our clients. It appears to be an issue with DHCP requests from different VLANS to a virtual machine running a DHCP server. I’m not sure it’s caused by ESX’s virtual networking or ESX’s interaction with our Cisco equipment. I have had this issue with both Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003’s DHCP servers. It would be interesting to know if a Linux server would have the same issue. I have had this issue a few times, once when we first setup our virtual infrastructure and again just this week after I rebooted the DHCP server.

Problem:

Clients that were rebooted were not able to logon properly or surf the internet, they effectively dropped off the network. Clients were receiving IP addresses that were not for their VLAN. For example, clients in the 10.80.8.x/21 subnet were getting 10.80.0.x/21 addresses. These clients were only able to ping the DHCP server.

Solution:

1. Open Virtual Infrastructure Client
2. Find & select virtual machine running DHCP
3. “Edit Settings” on virtual machine
4. Select network adapter used for DHCP
5. Uncheck “Connected”
6. Click “OK”
7. “Edit Settings” on virtual machine again
8. Select network adapter used for DHCP
9. Check “Connected”
10. Click “OK”

Essentially you are resetting the network connection. I don’t know why this works, but I’d like to know!

There’s an old list of how different programming languages let you shoot yourself in the foot. I managed to do something similar on our virtual servers last Wednesday. I just got it fixed Saturday afternoon.

I learned something. Never touch the disks of a virtual machine that has snapshots. “The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created.” Fear these words, for you will lose sleep over them. Below is a time line of what got me into the mess and how I got myself out. I tried a few more things, but this is what actually worked.
Read the rest of this entry »

I have been trying to ‘fix’ the issues I had discussed in the original posting with our servers which had undergone a Physical to Virtual migration.

So far I’ve tried two things:

• Disable Symantec Antivirus
• Switch the HAL of the server from ACPI Multiprocessor to ACPI Uniprocessor

I happened across the second option through some google searches. Have a look at the following URLs:

http://kb.vmware.com/KanisaPlatform/Publishing/647/1077_f.SAL_Public.html
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=415307
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=29202

It’s only been 1 day so far, but our wwoods-dc2 server I had talked about before is now humming in the 0-25% CPU utilization range. This seems to be a huge difference from what it was running at previously. Disabling Symantec Antivirus wasn’t noticeable. Read the rest of this entry »

I am putting together a virtualization presentation for IT people in education settings at the moment. I’m going to overview what virtualization is, what options are available (VMware, Microsoft, Xen), and describe the project we executed this summer (What, Why, How). I hope to make it as accessible as possible and get those that might not be exposed to emerging technologies like virtualization, excited about the subject.

I have submitted a request for a session at the eTech Ohio Educational Technology Conference. I hope it gets accepted.

I will be presenting this next week (October 18th, 2006) at SOITA. More information should be available at this page when they update it!

If anyone has materials that may be useful (especially virtualization related clipart), send me an email. Contact information is available using the button above.

I’ve been using Parallels Desktop for OS X (build 1848 and 1884) on my MacBook to put together demos for my Desktop Deployment seminar. I could have used VMware Workstation on my HP Compaq nc6120 like I do on my workstation, but my MacBook is faster and it gave me an excuse to try out Parallels Desktop. The following are the areas I think are important differences from my experience with VMware Workstation: Read the rest of this entry »

Just a heads up to a bug I found in Wordpress while trying to get my pages in order. Any backslashes I used in my code or scripts in pre tags would eventually be eaten by Wordpress and create garbage. Here’s the fix:

http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2059

Over the last few weeks/months I’ve noticed something on our VMware Infrastructure cluster. All of the servers that we converted from physical to virtual servers use up much more CPU and total memory than equivalently taxed pure virtual machines doing the same tasks. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve noticed something new that my MacBook does compared to my previous PowerBook. Often I will use my battery into the ground and OS X will force the notebook into sleep mode. I’ll stick it into my bag until I can charge it.

If I left it in my bag until the battery went empty, the PowerBook would die. I would have to plug it in again and boot it up.

The MacBook does things a bit differently. If you leave it in your bag long enough, it will die. However, once you plug it back in and power it up again, you will see a screen similar to the startup screen, but with a progress bar. Once it’s done in a few seconds, you’ll be back to where you left off. For someone like me that leaves 10 websites open and any number of other files, this is awesome. I don’t lose anything now. I wonder why they didn’t advertise this feature!

Apple calls it the “Safe Sleep” feature. It’s documented in support article 302477. It looks like they added it in the last revision of the PowerBooks.

If you’d like to enable this on a system that doesn’t have it on by default you can try this article by Andrew Escobar.

The following is only a hypothetical situation and may or may not have actually happened:

You do a P2V of a HP StorageWorks NAS b2000. It goes well, no errors to report. You hook up the VMDKs to your new virtual server, and crank up your new server. You cross your fingers as you click the “Open Console” button. You sigh in relief looking at the “Ctrl+Alt+Del” logon screen of your former physical server.

But, what’s this?

“The server you are running cannot run StorageWorks NAS software properly. You may be in violation of your license agreement. Please contact HP support immediately if you think this message is displayed in error. The server will Blue Screen in one minute.”

You don’t believe it would actually blue screen your file server, what would be madness! A few seconds later, it proves you wrong. Oh no! What to do? Read the rest of this entry »