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Ivan Versluis August 13th, 2008

Who could ever believe and see VMWare releasing their ESX for free. Last night I read small post on my Windows Mobile device.

What is VMware ESXi 3.5?
VMware ESXi 3.5 is the industry’s first, thin hypervisor integrated into server hardware. With its next-generation architecture embedded in hardware, VMware ESXi enables a plug-and-play data center with greater security, reliability and manageability. Requiring no installation and minimal configuration, VMware ESXi accelerates server deployment—IT organizations can take servers from boot-up to running production applications in virtual
machines in minutes.

List of features is amazing and now we all get them for free. Check the full list here, but these are which I like:

• Bare-metal architecture
• Small Footprint with only 32MB
• Virtualization for storage and support for iSCSI
• VLAN tagging support
• Wake-on LAN
• 64bit support

Basically all features I missed with VMWare Server and now getting them for free with ESX3i version.

Why is VMware making ESXi free? VMware is making its standalone ESXi hypervisor available at no cost in order to help companies of all sizes experience the benefits of virtualization. Customers have shown tremendous interest in ESXi due to its innovative architecture, simple setup, and high performance. Allowing IT administrators to obtain VMware ESXi for free enables everyone to gain access to VMware’s datacenter technology and prove its value in their own companies.

I have nothing more to add than just go download the VMware ESXi data sheet for more information and get a free copy of VMware ESXi and try it for yourself. I am running couple of production host servers with VMWare Server  and will upgrade them very soon.

Tags: 3.5, ESX, free, i, VMWare

• ESX
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Ivan Versluis June 25th, 2008

I am running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition 64bit edition and after I installed VMWare Workstation 6.04 Linux x64 edition I got the following error when trying to start my virtual machines sitting on a NTFS USB disk volume.

VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0)
Failed to allocate page for guest RAM!
A log file is available in “/media/USB_DATA/NET-DC-01/vmware.log”.  Please request support and include the contents of the log file.
To collect data to submit to VMware support, select Help > About and click “Collect Support Data”. You can also run the “vm-support” script in the Workstation folder directly.
We will respond on the basis of your support entitlement.

Please click OK and locate the vm file. Open the vmx file with nano or another text editor and add the setting below. Save the file and try to start the virtual machine again.

This setting doesn’t use named-file - use for VMs on USB-disks or other slow disks
Windows: useNamedFile= “FALSE” causes memory to be backed by the host’s swap space.
Linux: useNamedFile= “FALSE” causes a hidden file to be created in a temporary directory, which is immediately deleted when you power off the VM

Tags: 64bit, allocate, Error, failed, linux, page, Ubuntu, vcpu-o, VMWare, workstation

• VMWare , Workstation
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Ivan Versluis June 12th, 2008

If you need to create 5 or more of Virtual Port groups on a vSwtich and you don’t want to use the VI client than logon on the service console and run the commands below.

For creating a new Virtual Port Group use:

Assigning a special VLAN to this a Virtual Port Group:

With these two simple commands I was able to push my sh script and create same “Networking” configuration on dozen of my ESX servers.

esxcfg-vswitch [options] [vswitch[:ports]]

  -a|–add              Add a new virtual switch.

  -d|–delete           Delete the virtual switch.

  -l|–list             List all the virtual switches.

  -L|–link=pnic        Set pnic as an uplink for the vswitch.

  -U|–unlink=pnic      Remove pnic from the uplinks for the vswitch.

  -M|–add-pg-uplink    Add an uplink to the list of uplinks for a portgroup

  -N|–del-pg-uplink    Delete an uplink from the list of uplinks for a portgroup

  -p|–pg=portgroup     Specify a portgroup for operation

                        Use ALL to set VLAN IDs on all portgroups

  -v|–vlan=id          Set vlan id for portgroup specified by -p

                        0 would disable the vlan

  -c|–check            Check to see if a virtual switch exists.

                        Program outputs a 1 if it exists, 0 otherwise.

  -A|–add-pg=name      Add a new portgroup to the virtual switch.

  -D|–del-pg=name      Delete the portgroup from the virtual switch.

  -C|–check-pg=name    Check to see if a portgroup exists.  Program

                        outputs a 1 if it exists, 0 otherwise.

  -B|–set-cdp          Set the CDP status for a given virtual switch.

                        To set pass one of “down”, “listen”, “advertise”, “both”.

  -b|–get-cdp          Print the current CDP setting for this switch.

  -m|–mtu=MTU          Set MTU for the vswitch.

  -r|–restore          Restore all virtual switches from the configuration file

                        (FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY).

  -h|–help             Show this message.

Tags: commandline, ESX, howto, Script, vlan

• ESX
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Ivan Versluis May 29th, 2008

Last two days I worked with a VMWare Premium Support engineer troubleshooting my VMWare ESX problem for booting the system. I will post another post with exact error messages, but we were not able to get into the service console nor did the other two boot options work. At some  point he asked me did I have a Linux Live-CD? I was think ooh Yeah going back to old school and grabbed my case and found a BackTrack2 cd from two years ago.

After the reboot  and boot into BackTrack we went trough couple of system settings and logs and he asked hey can you forward me the esxcfg-boot.log to me  by email…. I was using the DRAC console and copy and paste is not going to work ;-(.  Guys from past remember the real tricks when we did those back than with IIS and within couple minutes I was able to get the orginal file to one of my tftpd daemon on the network.

How did I get the log files?

•  
  • Download, burn the iso and boot from CD-rom
  • Login with root/toor
  • I prefer the GUI and start KDE by running startx
  • Open Console session
  • ifconfig eth0 up
  • dhcpcd eth0
  • check you ip address with ifconfig eth0
  • now run tftp
  • open ip address
  • put esxcfg-boot.log or any other.

That’s all. For more information and download go to http://www.remote-exploit.org/.

Tags: ESX, howto, livecd, logfiles, network

• ESX
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Ivan Versluis May 19th, 2008

If you are curios and interested like I am than the latest VMWare Workstation 6.5 beta is definitely something to download and install on your system.

Why Participate in a VMware Beta Program?

Here are a few reasons why you should participate in VMware beta programs.

• Exposure to the next generation features helps you grow your technical skills and understand the direction of the virtualization industry.
• Ability to prove that the product will work properly in your environment and report areas where it doesn’t.
• Prototype your solution during the beta program and be ready for deployment when we reach General Availability.
• Help shape today’s product and tomorrow’s features.
• Ability to work with VMware engineers on some programs.
• Problems encountered have a higher probability of being fixed by GA.

Join the new beta program for Workstation 6.5 here.

New Features in VMware Workstation 6.5:

• Seamless integration of guest and host applications with Unity
• Enhanced advanced VM Record and Replay
• Support for Smart Cards & Smart Card Readers
• Link state propagation networking
• Enhanced ACE authoring capabilities
• Easy Install Option’s support for Linux
• Improved 3D graphics Support
• Release 91182 supports ESX 3.5 and 3i installations

For me personally I would like to explore Unity and ESX in virtual machine support features. I like to keep my system as clean as possible and right now I can have one virtual machines hosting all my applications which I use occasionally. I don’t want to install Adobe Photoshop, Paintshop,  Visual Studio and many others on my host system; with Unity I can bring all those application to my host system. Definitely  something I will use quite often.

Since the release of ESX 3.5 and 3i I have been waiting to have a working installation of those products into VMWare Workstation. Thanks to Eric from NTPRo.nl who is confirming that ESX is up and running in the latest release of VMWare Workstation 6.5 beta.

Tags: 3.5, beta, ESX, support, unity, VMWare, workstation

• Workstation
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Ivan Versluis April 7th, 2008

Cisco IOS introduced the support of a range command in Release 12.0(7)XE, Release 12.1 E, and Release 12.1(5)T and above to select multiple ports wihtin the Cisco switch interface configuration. I am using the range function to assign my first twently gigabit ports as trunk interfaces for my VMWare ESX environment.

The Interface Range Specification feature allows specification of a range of interfaces to which subsequent commands are applied and supports definition of macros that contain an interface range. The Interface Range Specification feature is implemented with the range keyword, which is used with the interface command. In the interface configuration mode with the range keyword, all entered commands are applied to all interfaces within the range until you exit interface configuration mode.

The Interface Range Specification feature makes configuration easier because:

•Identical commands can be entered once for a range of interfaces, rather than being entered separately for each interface.

•Interface ranges can be saved as macros.

Switch1#enable

Switch1(config)#interface range gigabitEthernet 0/1 - 20

Switch1(config-if-range)#spanning-tree portfast

Switch1(config-if-range)#switchport mode trunk

Switch1(config-if-range)#^Z

Switch1# copy running-configuration startup-configuration

Switch1#show running-configuration

It can save some time when configuring a new Cisco switch and not assigning manual configuration for each Ethernet interface.

If you are installing different VMWare ESX servers than the CDP support in the networking area can help you find the right port on your Cisco switch; for details check my previous post. After I identified the port than I went back to the switch configuration and add the interface description!

Tags: Cisco, interface, ios, range, trunk

• Cisco , VMWare
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Ivan Versluis March 12th, 2008

I copied one of my Windows XP virtual machine running on a VMWare Server 1.02 host locally to my workstation. After the files were copied I opened the vmx file with VMWare Workstation 6 and received the error below after trying to start the virtual machine. I made one snapshot on the VMWare Server host.

Cannot open the disk ‘C:\VM-machines\Windows XP-001\Windows XP Professional-000001.vmdk’ or one of the snapshot disks it depends on. Reason: Failed to lock the file.

 

Locate the virtual machine in Windows Explorer and delete any .lck folders

Start the virtual machine. If this fails try to Map the virtual hard disk to Z:\

I than disconnect the virtual hard disk and retried. The virtual machine boot without any problem; my snapshot was valid.

Tags: failed, file, lock, vmdk, VMWare, workstation

• VMWare
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Ivan Versluis March 2nd, 2008

At some point the VMWare Server  host run out of diskspace on which the virtual guest machines were stored. Windows started to complain about low disk space and only 32KB was left. I tried to open VMWare Server console and I got the error message below "511 vmware-serverd service is not running." All virtual machines were running except the one which consumed the remaining diskspace of the physical SAS drives.

To resolve this issue I shutdown one of the virtual machines with a RDP session and moved the directory to another VMWare Server host; next step I did I tried to bring other virtual machines down by a RDP session and at some point I was left with two other virtual machines which both were not accessible by RDP nor by SSH for the linux one.

I opened Task Manager and located the remaining processes for the virtual machines.

vmware-vmx.exe is individual process for each virtual machine. Two were left and I stopped both vmware-vmx.exe processes. Open Services.msc console and restart the "VMware Registration Service" service.

After the service was restarted the initial process of starting the virtual machines started and all virtual machines were up and running. This is how I resolved the problem with VMWare Server, but it brings me back to the root cause of why this happened and one of the import things is to really think how you are going to seize your virtual machines and their disk space. I am going to implement thresholds and notifications with CactiEZ appliance soon and hopefully something which can help you also.

Tags: diskspace, full, hdd, low, not, running, server, service, VMWare, vmware-serverd

• VMWare
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Ivan Versluis February 25th, 2008

The latest version for VMWare Converter has been out since 3rd of December last year and doing the p2v migration yesterday it helped me to quickly decide how to proceed. The scheduled p2v migration took me very long and I decided to use my evaluation cd of Acronis True Image Server.  After six and half hours I copied less than of 20GB of the physical server with VMWare Converter.

New features in v3.0.2 update 1 include:

Conversion of VMware hardware version 6 products: Workstation 6.x, VMware ACE 2.x, VMware Fusion 1.x, and VMware Player 2.x
Conversion of an additional third-party disk image format: Acronis True Image 9
Experimental support for Microsoft Vista 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems
Ability to set speed and duplex settings on the network adapter while performing cold cloning migrations, by using the VMware Converter Enterprise Boot CD
Support for Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 7.0

I was excited to see the direct import from VMWare Converter and tib backups. So I reboot the server; connected the usb disk and created a backup of the two partitions I wanted to convert into a vmware image. The whole process took me less than one hour. One huge tib file was created and than I went to my host machine with VMWare Converter and restarted the import process but this ended with a error (VMWare Converter Import Wizard - Unable to load the source virtual machine or image. The file may be corrupt, or of an unsupported format)….

In the logfile I found the following messages:

[#4] [ 'App' 124 error] [tibvolumeimagedriver,316] Error while mounting image

[#4] [ 'App' 124 error] [v2iDiskWin32,198] THIRDPARTY_LIB

[#4] [ 'App' 124 error] [v2iImportSource,168] Import source not recognized

['P2V' 3752 error] [task,295] Task failed: P2VError IMPORT_SOURCE_NOT_RECOGNIZED()

['P2V' 3752 verbose] [task,339] Transition from InProgress to Failure requested

I am sure that the tib archive was fine and I even verified the backup. These error messages I have seen before with importing VirtualPC or Virtual Server virtual machines. I will trying to figure out why the tib volume driver loading is failing with VMWare converter. So far so good the Acronis True Image Server did convert the tib backup successfully to VMWare image and server is at least up and running for test.

Acronis True Image Echo Server and Convert Backup to Virtual Disk screenshot. This option will only convert the backup to a selected virtualization product; for VMWare Workstation first create the virtual machine and use the converted virtual disks as existing ones. It supports VMWare, VMware ESX, Microsoft Virtual PC and Parallels. I have been couple times in successful doing the p2v migrations with Acronis and I will proceed with testing of this product. Stay tuned for this product here.

Tags: Acronis, conversion, converter, issue, p2v, tib, VMWare, workaround

• Acronis , VMWare
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Ivan Versluis February 6th, 2008

Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) allows ESX Server 3 administrators to determine which Cisco switch port is connected to a given vSwitch. When CDP is enabled for a particular vSwitch, you can view properties of the Cisco switch (such as device ID, software version, and timeout) from the VI Client. You can use the service console command-line interface to enable CDP.

Using this information and without going to the server room and locating the network cable in the rack I was able to configure the interface on the switch real time.

The switchport should be set as trunk and for security reasons also configure the allowed vlan’s.

interface GigabitEthernet0/15
description ** ESX-01 Trunk port LAN **
switchport trunk allowed vlan 1,200
switchport mode trunk
spanning-tree portfast
!

Tags: 3i, cdp, Cisco, ESX, trunk, vlan, VMWare

• VMWare
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