Have decided to stick with this theme for now, but would like to colourise it a bit when I find out how.
In the meantime am making a note after installing XP in a VM on VMWare workstation. I needed to:
ethernet0.virtualDev = "vmxnet"All because XP does not contain drivers for those fancy VMWare devices, by default.
This is a first. Typing this blog on the train at Charing Cross at the end of the second day of Briforum London 2012. Great Briforum BTW. I am setting myself a target of submitting a talk to Techtarget for next year, probably on Numecent’s application Jukebox.
Some great conversations, demos, meetings. I will be absorbing the content for a while. Am conscious that I am overdue writing up the last OUOUG meeting and that I tentatively said I would prepare a cloud talk for a conference soon.
I hope I can get both those tasks off my list soon, and Blog in more detail about BriForum.
One of the things I am working on at the moment is a VDI design based on a smallish branch office architecture. If you are familiar with VDI, you will know that one of the key metrics is the number of IOPs that the back-end storage needs to support. Historically, VDI projects underestimated this figure or the storage was unable to deliver what was required.
What would be useful is an I/O simulator, a disk subsystem on which you could tweak the IOPs performance to see what effect it had on guests. This idea has been looked at very successfully by Jim Moyle with the Atlantis ILIO product and he has written some great papers on the results.
But I wondered if a basic form of simulation could be done using VMware’s storage IO control (SIOC) or one of the storage appliances available from the virtual appliance marketplace (StorMagic and FalconStor are two options on the front page of the VA marketplace).
It would be worth investigating these options which may pay great dividends in a VDI design exercise. The Rolls-Royce solution would be a complete simulation of every layer in the VDI stack, of course. Network, broker, server and storage.
Have been looking at an ESX 4.1 cluster recently in which one host was being a bit truculent. After a BIOS upgrade the host seemed to be behaving itself so after a couple of weeks of stress testing with no issues I added it back into the cluster.
However, nothing would migrate to it and I eventually tracked down three separate issues (note to self):
Caveat implementor.
Having recently worked on a private cloud implementation, I would like to point out the difference between external and internal/private clouds. They are really quite different things.
Some things are obvious. If you are building an internal cloud, you need to buy hardware and some cloud software solution. If you are looking at an external cloud, you don’t need to worry about any of that. All you are concerned about is getting the service (software as a service) you want from your cloud provider. This is what most people expect when they talk about “cloud”.
To make an internal cloud work, while you will no doubt be providing a service, the biggest challenge is integrating that service into existing infrastructure. For example, organisations have a naming standard, how do you integrate with that? Organisations have asset registers, charging models, directory services etc. It is highly likely that any internal cloud will need to interface with all those existing systems.
Getting cloud software installed and running is the easy bit. Integrating with the other systems is where the challenges are.
There are two extremes when using a computer these days: in the blue corner we have access everything remotely and in the red corner we have take everything with you. Most solutions appear at various levels of compromise between the two.
My recent attempts at “taking everything with you” are proving quite successful, albeit with one caveat. My 1TB hard drive may be suffering from hardware issues and require a re-format. It has led to several nasty messages from VMware workstation about not being able to write memory. This drive is the one that contains all my VMs. A means to back up the hard-drive is certainly required! Luckily it seems like a straightforward copy of the files works, but I have not tried to “restore” them yet.
After running chkdsk on the hard drive connected to the host, booting the VM caused Windows to run it’s own chkdsk on the C: drive. So far everything seems to be ok but regular backups will be continued!
Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum I finished a remote access trial of “gotomypc” http://www.gotomypc.co.uk/remote_access/remote_access. Very stable, performant and easy. The one drawback being cost. So I am about to try some other solutions. “logmein” is next on the list https://secure.logmein.com/. It’s free.
I am impressed with the 1TB Freecom XXS drive I bought. I have used it to backup my QNAP prior to a firmware upgrade and I am now using it for a bunch of VMware workstation virtual machines.
Maximum write speed of XXS
I am not impressed with the interoperability of VMware products. I exported a guest from vsphere into an ovf package but you can’t import this into VMware workstation! I’ve had this problem before and there are plenty fixes on the web. Still very annoying though.
Workstation import error
As it happens, I realise that I created this ovf by exporting a hardware version 8 machine which I strongly suspect will not load into VMware workstation 7. Have to wait for an upgrade.
As discussed in the earlier post, just to prove that persistence and patience pay off.
Converter Output
I often think patience is the most important quality needed in ICT.
My P2V finally ran to completion in some small hour of the morning. I haven’t had time to boot it up yet but that is certainly good progress.
I don’t have any detailed technical explanation of why it finally worked but following my intuition, call it guesswork, got me through. Not ideal but there’s plenty of room for creativity in IT.
My initial attempt, after chopping out the NAS datastore (QNAP), VC Appliance and a bunch of services from my source machine, failed at 31% with a blue screen. The only change I made was to unplug a USB DVD writer and try again, at which point it ran to completion.
I will include a screenshot later.
My next steps will be to storage vmotion the target to the NAS, grow the disk (which was thin an minimal spec.) and see how it performs, assuming it works at all.
P2V-ing old laptops is something I have mentioned in the past and had some success with. I’m a fan.
At the moment I am trying to P2V a four year old HP mini-notebook running XP onto my ESXi 1.5 lab environment using VMware converter. I’m not having much success. VMware Converter fails at different points, mostly around 2% but in one case it got to 24% before blue-screening.
I started by using my QNAP as a datastore but have given up on that as I don’t think it, or maybe my network, can cope. I could have experimented with throttling the bandwidth but its time, time, time. I’ve made some space on the locally attached storage of my ESXi host but without any immediate improvement.
I am running the converter locally and connecting to the new VC appliance. That itself is pretty fat and may be using too much resource itself so I may cut that out too.
Other things I need to try are slimming down the services running on the old machine. You know how stuff tends to build up like limescale on top of your OS.
Will keep posting my progress.
How about that, an actual post about P2V!