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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!

If you will be at the eTech Ohio Educational Technology Conference next week, come see me. I have 2 sessions: Virtualization Everywhere and Desktop Deployment. Both are on Wednesday afternoon. If you are looking for the notes/slides from these sessions, just click the appropriate heading at the top of the site. You should be able to download the handouts from there.

I hope to post some thoughts on the sessions I visit each day, so look out for those.

Update: I think I will post results and new ideas from the sessions when I get home instead of trying to do it here in the hotel. I also updated all the handouts to the newest version of the slideshow tonight. If you saw the session and have comments, leave a comment on this post!

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 »

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 »

Today I deployed my first virtual machine from template using a customization specification. I talked a little bit about them in a previous article.

To start, you need to install Sysprep deep inside VirtualCenter’s CommonAppData folder. I’m not sure why would you would need to download/install ALL of those sysprep version folders. There is one for Sysprep 1.1, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows 2003. I only installed the Windows 2003 SP1 Sysprep tools (there’s a newer one than the CD edition on Microsoft’s website) to the Windows 2003 folder (look at the PDFs linked in the previous article for a specific path).

My template was already syspreped. I created a customization specification. My customization specification was very generic so it will work for almost all of my deployments. I had it ask me at deployment time for static IP, computer name, and such. One bug during the TCP/IP section, it forced me to include a default gateway and an alternate gateway. That seems pretty useless.

I deployed my template, it asked for all the information as I specified. And.. It worked just as I thought it would. It was already booted up by the time I got the console open. I chose not to join the VM to our domain right away in the customization specification, so I logged in and did that manually.

I’m not sure if having my template already syspreped mattered, I haven’t been able to find official instructions on how to make a Windows template and for use with customization specifications. I’ll have to try to deploy a template to a non-syspreped template and see how that works. I may have gotten lucky!

I keep finding things out about VI3 that I hadn’t read anywhere else. First it was the IDE drive support ‘issue.’ But now, it’s about making templates. I was under the impression that creating a template in VI3 involved: Installing Windows, updating Windows, performing any tweaks, creating a sysprep.inf, running Sysprep with reseal, shutting down VM, and then creating a template by cloning the VM.

Today I stumbled upon a sort-of hidden feature of VI3 called Customization Specifications. As far as I can tell, it allows you to set system settings on the VM as you deploy it from a template. To be more precise, when deploying a Windows VM you can specify the computer name, domain info, and TCP/IP settings (static IPs) for the VM during the process of creating a VM from one of your templates. Much better than having to set those things manually!

I found a document called VirtualCenter 2: Templates Usage and Best Practices on VMware’s website. It has a small section on Customization Specifications but doesn’t go into much detail. I can’t tell if I still need to Sysprep the VM, then this will go in and edit my sysprep.inf or if I just need to stop after updating/tweaking and this will do all the sysprep work for me. That seems to be an important piece of information!

There’s a little more info in the VI3 Basic System Administration PDF. Especially Appendix B, Installing the Microsoft Sysprep Tools.

For such an awesome feature, why do they try to hide it so well?

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