The last steps of the VI3 upgrade process involve the virtual machines. Upgrading the VM hardware and the installed VM tools complete the virtual infrastructure migration, but can be a daunting task if you have numerous ESX hosts and guests. Fortunately, there are a couple of ways you can simultaneously update multiple VMs. One method uses the VI client and the other involves entering a console command on the VirtualCenter server.
If you are looking for a quick reference to determine which versions of VirtualCenter are compatible with which versions of ESX then check out the VMware Infrastructure Compatibility Matrixes .pdf.
The following image is the ESX Server and VirtualCenter Compatibility table from the .pdf linked above. Note that VC 2.5 is backwards compatible with earlier ESX versions, but ESX 3.5 is only compatible with VC 2.5. Also note that VMware Server is still compatible only with VC 1.4. I believe I remember hearing something about future versions of VC will be able to manage both ESX and VMware Server hosts, but I could be wrong. Maybe with the new VMware Server 2.0?
Click on the image for a larger version.
I was not aware that you could not install WinXP SP2 or earlier versions as a VM on Microsoft’s Hyper-V servers. I haven’t had the opportunity to play with Hyper-V yet, so I I’ll attribute missing this fact to not having the need to know. I’m sure there are a bunch of administrators in the same stage of evaluation as me. Hopefully this post will not be old news to most. XP SP3 will become available for download this week as an optional update. Microsoft will begin pushing XP SP3 to everyone that has Windows Update set to Automatic in early June.
The problem with installing XP SP2 on Hyper-V is that you can not install Integration Services (also called VM Additions or VMtools by other vendors), and without Integration Services you do not have network adapters in the VM. Christian Saborío sums up the problem in his post titled How to Install Integration Services on a Virtual Machine without Windows XP SP3.
“The problem happened when importing a Virtual hard disk that I had that had Windows XP SP2. See, in order for a VM to take full advantage of Hyper-V, you need to have the Integration Services installed (these are the new Virtual Machine Additions, in Virtual Server lingo). In order to install the Integration Services, I needed to have Windows XP SP3 - which I could easily download; but the VM did not had network support. Why? Because it needed Integration Services…see where I am getting at here?”
Christian explains that he was able to slipstream an .iso of XP with SP3 and, after a new install he had a running VM.
Microsoft announced that XP SP3 will be generally available this week. I found the following useful info
VMware Certified Professionals command higher salaries, report shows is SearchServerVirtualization.com blog written by Joe Foran that explores the value of the VCP certification. Joe uses indeed.com to create a graph that compares the average annual salary of today’s popular technical certifications to demonstrate that, as Joe puts it, “the VCP is as hot as ever”. I figured if Joe can do it I can do it too, so I used indeed.com to recreate basically the same salary comparison table for this post.
This weeks edition is centered on the topic of quick migration versus VMware HA and VMotion. We start with a post from the Windows Virtualization Team’s blog site and then explore some responses from a couple popular blogs in the virtualization community. Finally, if you have not seen Microsoft’s Quick Migration in action then check out the video at the end of this post. Links to the full posts are provided by clicking the section titles. Enjoy!
Some of the following text and instructions were copied in part from the post VMware ESX 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 small features guide by Eric Siebert found on searchvmware.techtarget.com.
“Prior to 3.5 you had to use the Service Console vmkfstools command to increase the size of a vmdk file. But now the VI Client can be used to grow virtual disks. Keep in mind that growing a virtual disk only increases the size of the vmdk disk file. It will not automatically increase the size of your OS disk partitions. This must be done manually afterwards. A variety of methods can be used, including OS tools, boot CD’s (e.g. Knoppix) and other utilities.”
Personally I recommend the GParted LiveCD for working with your OS disk partitions. It is an open-source utility similar to Partition Magic that will work on all file systems.
Up until ESX version 3.5 you had to modify various config files to configure ESX NTP time sync. This process was previously automated by the set_ntp.sh script, but now it is even easier because the VI Client can now configure the necessary NTP settings for the ESX host natively.
if you just need to change an ESX server’s DNS servers, default gateway, or hostname you can use the VI client to make the changes. This might be a rare scenario, but it happens every once in a while.
Earlier this week I was able to attend one of the free Heroes Happen Here events Microsoft is hosting. Although I only attended the morning IT Pro - Infrastructure sessions, the event also had sessions on SQL 2008 , Visual Studio 2008, and a Small Business Server and Essential Business Server session. All things considered it is an event worth attending if you have the time. The format was a a surprisingly minimum number of presentation slides and a lot of live demonstrations.
Here are the primary reasons I was glad I went:
Is the mixed virtualization vendor data center possible? is Virtualization Pro blog that builds upon other discussions about the technical advantages and administrative logistics involved with the possibility of using different virtualization vendors in the same data center. In this post author Adam Trujillo expands on comments from other linked posts on the same topic - what types of applications and services might be best implemented on VMware ESX, Citrix Xenserver, or Microsoft’s Hyper-V, and how all of these virtual hosts could probably be used side by side by the same IT staff.
From Adam’s post:
“I threw out the notion that data center managers might use, for example, Hyper-V for end-user file servers; VMware ESX for apps that require dynamic load balancing, sophisticated disaster recovery and migration, and Xen for commodity Linux boxes.
The idea behind that supposition was to match your enterprise investments to appropriate workloads because, let’s face it, running everything on ESX is going to be expensive compared to other options. Big deal if you don’t get ESX-level features because you may get enterprise level features on silver-medal products.”
This post peaked my interest because I too have had similar discussions about the potential for a multi virtualization vendor data center, and I see it as a reality that architects, consultants, and administrators need to prepare for. My reasoning is not so much based on technical features, but on vendor optimization and support.
The free VMware Server does not have the resource pools or shares system like ESX or ESXi. However, you can manually create priorities for your guest VMs to imitate the effects of these features. If you have a Linux host you can use the scheduler to prioritize by PID, or for any host OS, you can modify the .vmx file of each VM to set priority. In effect, both these methods create a “tug of war” design similar to the resource pool design I discussed in my post titled Designing ESX Resource Pools. The details of using both methods are discussed in this post.
Innotek VirtualBox is a free, open-source alternative to VMware workstation. Aquired by Sun Microsystems earlier this year, VirtualBox has quickly become one of the leading developer platforms for the desktop with current features that rival even VMware’s latest version 6.5 currently in beta testing. I have used VirtualBox in the past, but because I had not used it in over almost over a year I was not aware of the latest features in the most recent releases. The feature that specifically caught my attention was the seamless window integration of Microsoft Windows virtual machines. Like VMware Workstation and Fusion’s Unity feature, VirtualBox allows Windows applications in the VM to pop out of the VM session making it available from the host operating system’s desktop.
Quoting from Sun’s announcement:
