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In the overview below I have summarized small list of supported features of my favorite desktop virtualization products. Hopefully this overview will help you decide which of those you should evaluate. Microsoft has Virtual PC 2007 which is for free but VMWare Workstation and Parallel Workstation have features which are missing in Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007.  Parallels Workstation license is $50 and the VMWare Workstation is $190 so depending on your requirements you should be able to make a good choice. For more details check the virtualization/desktop page which has more information.

For me personally I would choose VMWare Workstation because of the following reasons:

• Support of x64 bits virtual machines. The main reason for this you can install Exchange Server 2007 64bit and test the product. I have been running Exchange Server 2007 for 6 months now in a vm guest with 2GB ram and it works great.
• Support for running ESX server into a virtual machine. I have been testing for a while with ESX server and using the VMWare Workstation solution. It helped me to get more familiarized with the ESX server and it’s components. ESX3i and ESX3.5 can be installed in a virtual machine with VMWare Workstation but the virtual machines can not be powered on. Update: 2008/11/06 –> VMWare Workstation 6.5 supports VMWare ESX3.5i and ESX 3.5 to be installed and virtual machines to be started.
• USB2.0 support. I redirected dozen of USB devices into my virtual machines for testing. One example was having a USB ADSL modem and the drivers were not available for Windows Vista; so I got my Windows XP virtual machine booted; redirected the USB ADSL model to my virtual machine; installed the drivers and I was able to browse the Internet. Redirected my finger print reader and tested the software on Windows Vista and Windows XP virtual machines, etc.
• Team of virtual machines. Neat feature and really useful when building a test lab with different kind of virtual machines (domain controller, dns, isa and exchange). 

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.

Before I read the Step by Step Guide document and quote below I tried getting the BitLocker drive encryption running in a virtual machine.

Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption Step-by-Step Guide

For a non-TPM scenario, you use a startup key to authenticate yourself. The startup key is located on a USB flash drive inserted into the computer before the computer is turned on. In such a scenario, your computer must have a BIOS that can read USB flash drives in the pre-operating system environment (at startup). Your BIOS can be checked by the hardware test near the end of the BitLocker setup wizard.

Using USB removable storage and VMWare virtual machine is just not going to work. The only way to get BitLocker working in a virtual machine is to change the group policy setting and allow BitLocker to work without a TPM chip and use a floppy disk as storage for the startup key. Floppy disk is available in a virtual machine during the boot process of Vista. I was successfully being able to run the BitLocker preparation tool but after the final check of the C volume encryption the system complained about the removable storage was not available during the boot process of Windows Vista.

BitLocker Drive Encryption from the control panel and steps which I executed before reading the Step by Step Guide.

Click Turn on BitLocker

Now I was required to put the Startup key on a USB device.

My USB flash disk was available in the virtual machine.

I clicked continue and restart now.

After logon the error message.

BitLocker could not be enabled. The system firmware failed to enable clearing of system memory on reboot. No encryption applied, any changed made to C: during BitLocker setup will be removed.

How to get BitLocker working in a virtual machine?

• Install Windows Vista SP1(Enterprise or Ultimate editions) in a virtual machine
• Make sure you partitioned or format the volumes in the right way. Use the SHIFT+F10 to perform these steps in Vista Setup.

create partition primary size=1500

assign letter=S

create partition primary

assign letter=c

If you don’t partition and format the hard disk this way use the BitLocker Drive Preparation Tool

• Change the GPO setting. Gpedit.msc and locate the “Control Panel Setup:Enable advanced startup options” setting  in Computer Configuration/Administrative Templates/Windows Components/Bitlocker Drive Encryption and configure “Control Panel Setup: Enable advanced startup options”; check Allow Bitlocker without compatible TPM chip. Reboot

• Make sure Floppy drive has been configured for the virtual machine and create new bitlocker.flp file. Format the disk.

• Open a privileged cmd prompt and run cscript c:\Windows\System32\manage-bde.wsf -on C: -rp -sk A:

• Reboot and make sure floppy drive is last option in the bios boot oder.

• Encryption in Progress. Keep in mind that BitLocker will encrypt the complete partition and in my case a SCSI harddisk of 64GB will be expanded. After the process has been finished I will end with 64GB virtual disk; same deal with physical hard disk only 6GB will be left during the encryption process. Anyway good lesson learned for my next virtual machine. Using these steps now I am able to test all different features and options available by BitLocker. If you buy new hardware today than the TPM complaint chip will be on your motherboard so setting up a virtual lab is good preparation for the real physical setup.

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.

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.

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
!