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!

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 just put a 160GB drive in my MacBook (pictured in the site header), what a hassle it was! I had to run to the hardware store to get the proper torx tool (T-8 in case you’re wondering).

First, I had issues creating an image (.DMG) of the 80GB drive. First I tried to create a image of the disk itself (disk0), not the volume (disk0s2). The resulting image wouldn’t mount. Not sure if it was just corrupted or if some other problem happened. I had problems formatting the external drive through the USB interface, the Firewire interface worked great.

What actually worked for me:

1. Install OS X to my external HD (using Firewire!) using the least install options possible. I had to reformat the volume for no reason to let OS X install to it, no idea why.
2. Update to newest OS X updates (They make changes/patches to Disk Utility that might help your imaging) to the external drive
3. Run disk utility
4. Create DMG of your VOLUME. It will look like “disk0s2,” not just “disk0.” Click File, New, Disk Image from disk0s2 (Yours may be different. So long as you click the correct volume in the left column of disk utility before going into this menu, it will show the correct volume).
5. I’d use read/write format, but it’s up to you. Compressed seemed to be CPU limited and took longer.
6. Start the process. I used Activity Monitor, disk activity tab to look at the transfer rate.
7. Shutdown MacBook, install new disk.
8. Boot up on external drive again
9. Find your disk image, mount it.
10. Partition new disk in disk utility
11. Go to Restore tab
12. Drag and drop the desktop icon of the volume to the source
13. Drag and drop the new drive icon on the desktop to the destination
14. Click restore
15. Reboot from new disk
16. Once you open your disk you’ll notice some new icons. Don’t delete them, they are important and should be hidden.
17. To get rid of your new friends etc, var, usr go to this link: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301677
18. Follow the directions (it’s just one command!)
19. Enjoy.

It seems to be working so far. I wish I had the time to do a proper reinstall, maybe later! I probably should have used Carbon Copy Cloner.

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 have had a hard time finding multimonitor wallpaper for my desktop at work, but no longer! Some of these are just amazing.

• http://www.mandolux.com/
• http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper/index.php
• http://images.lunarpages.com/

August 21st is the deadline. The computers (and software, and countless other things) must be ready to use.

Summer time in our department is probably unlike anything a non-educational organization’s IT department must face. It’s a curse and a blessing. We get an opportunity to do large upgrades, taking down servers for multiple days if necessary. We must maintenance every computer (about 1500) to get it ready for the students to use over the next school year. Once the students come back, it’s prime time, the reason we even exist.

But why is that so hard? Read the rest of this entry »

Important Notice: This post has been updated using a newer, easier method. Read more here.

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

I wish I had been told about the caveats of importing your old VMware Workstation or Server virtual machines into ESX. VMware always talks about how portable their virtual machines are. They aren’t lying, but once you switch to ESX, it’s not nearly as easy as it is with all of their other products.

I had a few Ubuntu or Debian virtual machines that I had been running on VMware Server. I also tried to copy my Windows XP virtual machine template to the ESX host. No dice. But why?

VMware ESX does not support virtual machine disk files that are IDE. You may only use SCSI disk files with ESX.

There’s not even an official migration or conversion path from IDE to SCSI, or even a reasonable unsupported one.

I wish that fact would have been posted somewhere. I’ve been using VMware Workstation for a long time now and I’ve never read about the IDE disk problem with ESX.

Now I did have a SCSI disk based virtual machine, and it imported pretty easily.

Update: I found two sites to try. I’ll update again if they actually work.

• http://sanbarrow.com/vmx-ide2scsi.html
• http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=439215

Fingers crossed.