It’s been a while! How have you been? Summer preparations are in full swing in our technology department. We’re getting everything ready for all of the teachers and students to start another year. Here are a few things I have been working on or will be working on before the end of the summer (interesting items in bold):

• Worked on a Windows XP SP3 integrated OS deployment installation
• Refreshed all district-wide application sets
• Built customized OpenOffice.org 2.4 installation package (No registration or Quick Start) for all classrooms
• Recorded Promethean ActivBoard training in HD and will be editing footage for online self-paced courses
• Helpdesk software training and workflow redesign
• Implementing print job accounting at additional locations
• Upgraded MSA1500 firmware to active/active controllers
• Upgraded virtual infrastructure from ESX 3.0 / VC 2.0 to ESX 3.5 / VC 2.5
• Replacing network core equipment, upgrading from Catalyst 4006 to 4 stacked 3750s with 10GbE capability
• Implementing extended proof of concept for VDI clients

If there are any of these topics you’re interested in, let me know in the comments and I’ll do a more complete writeup!

I had a request to install and configure an instant messaging service for a couple of users who operated out of different buildings. After doing some research, I went with the Jabber/XMPP server called Wildfire. Most of the other servers I looked at seemed to require much more configuration than Wildfire. Wildfire also ran officially on Windows, which is a requirement for our more important services. It was installed and had basic functionally within just a few minutes.

LDAP configuration was easy to initially configure, but took some research to properly setup. I now have an Active Directory group that provides instant messaging access, and I can use other groups to automatically organize users so there is no need to manually manage contact lists. I also have disabled the users ability to add other users to their contact lists to keep user groups isolated.

To test the new service, I used the Spark client inside the Technology Center to see how it would work on a department scale. Everyone seemed to like it, but doubted the overal usefulness of an instant messaging service to a department with close physical proximity.

After seeing the service working well, I switched into deployment mode. I had to make the instant messaging service automatically deploy for users who needed it. The clients must automatically sign on or it doesn’t work. After doing more research, I rolled out the Pandion client to my department officially. I created a custom MSI with preconfigured settings and deployed using group policy.

Pandion includes the unique ability to use integrated Windows authentication. The client loads automatically on logon, and signs on automatically using the credentials of the users domain logon. Wildfire required a 3rd party patch to enable this functionality. Be aware that the patch I linked is only for version 3.0+ of Wildfire.

Soon after rolling out the client to my department, someone saw the client and really liked the idea of instant messaging. So last week I deployed it to another department. I have not received any feedback at this point so I don’t know how well it is going. I will post again once there has been enough time to do a proper review of instant messaging here.

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 »

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 »

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 »

The students are back Monday! Teachers have been back in full effect since Wednesday.

I’ve already noticed our old file server ‘going red’ due to CPU usage in Virtual Center with the teachers in session. I’m not sure why.. the server isn’t doing anything but serving files. I’m curious to see how it will hold up with all the students online next week!

Lack of updates has been due to the lack of time to work on anything interesting! I hope things calm down once the students are back in session. We will be working on a large website project to overhaul the school site and intranet pages over this year. Other than virtualization, good web applications are an interest area of mine.

I received an email from Damian Murdoch over at ozvms.com about my Ubuntu and VMware Tools article. So if you came from his site, welcome! I think it’s my most popular article, even VMTN has linked to it! (I really need a proper hit counter for this site!)

If this your first time here, check out the other articles, leave a comment or two, and add my page to your favorite RSS reader! Hope to see you around!

The following is an email I had sent to a local technology coordinators listserv after someone asked about the free VMware Server. I’m sure I will go into more detail about our recent virtualization project on this blog in the future. Also, I have submitted for a session at the eTech Ohio Conference to discuss virtualization, how we’re using it, and what we learned from our project. I also plan to put together a desktop deployment session, since it seems to be a hot topic in other school districts. Read the rest of this entry »

My Major Tasks to Complete:

• Test, test, and retest mass account creation for staff and student accounts
• Fix sound card issue on notebooks and verify it works (oops.)
• Test and tweak student computer lockdown security
• Install Read 180 Enterprse on server and create client package
• Create as many software packages as possible before start of school, and keep going until they’re all done
• Ensure Destiny install goes well. Upgrade SQL server to newest service pack.

All of this seems pretty easy and possible if I were able to focus on them exclusively. But, I can’t. I’m being pulled in many different directions so that I can’t stay focused on one task for more than an hour. It’s starting to get to stress me a little.

Update: I wrote this last week. This week has been quite a bit better. I think we’ll be okay, aside from all the software we still need to package. I just noticed the title of this post has 2 meaning depending how you read it!