Gorillapond Dot Com

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 »

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 »

I’ve had a really hard time trying to find the way to get VMware Tools on Linux virtual machines, but I’ve got it down to just a few steps. If you’re using a ‘big name’ distribution with a graphical interface, it’s not hard to install. But, I like to use Debian or Ubuntu, without X11 (the aforementioned “graphical interface”), so it’s a pain in the butt.

How to install Vmware Tools on Ubuntu without X11:

1. Install Ubuntu Server
2. Login
3. Create a root shell:sudo bash
4. Update your sources:apt-get update
5. Upgrade your installed packages (dist-upgrade to force kernel upgrade):apt-get dist-upgrade
6. Reboot
7. Create a root shell again:sudo bash
8. Install packages VMware Tools needs:apt-get install linux-headers-server build-essential
9. Install VMware tools
10. Mount the VMware Tools CD ISO:mount /cdrom
11. Copy VMware Tools to home:cp /cdrom/VmwareTools-x.x.x-xxxxx.tar.gz ~
12. Go home:cd ~
13. Untar/Gzip the install:tar -zxf VmwareTools-x.x.x-xxxxx.tar.gz
14. Go into the resulting directory:cd vmware-tools-distrib
15. Start the installer:./vmware-install.pl
16. Install will ask you questions, the defaults should work fine.
17. Remove the basic AMD PCnet module (if you get errors about building the ethernet driver, run this command and start at step 14 again):rmmod pcnet32
18. Rebuild module dependancies:depmod -a
19. Install the VMware accelerated network interface:modprobe vmxnet
20. Restart network service:/etc/init.d/networking restart
21. Reboot