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Many administrators today are testing Microsoft Server 2008, or even testing running Server 2008 as a guest hosted on various virtualization products. There are also plenty of projects not even related to virtualization involving testing applications and services on Microsoft’s newest server operating system. For those looking for a little more time, there is the option to extend the standard Server 2008 evaluation period. The Dugie’s Pensieve blog post Extend the Windows Server 2008 evaluation period (KB 948 472) first made me aware this was possible.

Normally, installing Server 2008 without a key gives you a 60 day evaluation period. As Dugie’s post point out, Microsoft has provided a KB article titled How to extend the Windows Server 2008 evaluation period which fully explains the use of the script and how many times you can “re arm” the evaluation.

From the KB article:

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VI3 Enterprise features VMotion, DRS, and HA require identical virtual networking settings on all of your ESX hosts. Unfortunately, VirtualCenter does not apply a central configuration policy or inheritance of settings from the cluster. Maybe a future version of VirtualCenter will evolve to include global configuration abilities? Until such a version is created, each ESX server’s virtual networking settings will continue to be configured individually by most administrators. However, there are some time saving, global configuration options available today. This post summarizes two methods provided by the virtualization community for creating PortGroups simultaneously across multiple ESX hosts.

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While attempting to clean up unnecessary virtual hardware after several P2V migrations this week, I was unable to remove the virtual USB Controller from new virtual machines. I got an uneditable device warning pop up window that said “Internal problem: The system information reported by the host for ‘VirtualUSBController’ is inconsistent. This device cannot currently be edited.”

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I wrote a post for the Virtualization Pro blog about my take on Microsoft’s ROI Calculator. I was inspired to check out the calculator by the VMware Virtual Reality post Microsoft’s Virtualization ROI/TCO Calculator: Our Take.

“…it wasn’t how Microsoft calculated the numbers that bothered me most. I struggled to understand why a TCO and ROI calculator included a competitive analysis. After all, VMware’s TCO calculator doesn’t compare the cost of competitor’s products. What does that have to do with return on investment? It just seems out of place to me. Furthermore, if you go back and review VMware’s points they are mostly about the competitive cost comparison, too. It’s easy to forget we are discussing a TCO / ROI calculator.”

Check out the whole post at Virtualization Competitive Analysis in the middle of an ROI Calculator? - Virtualization Pro: A SearchVMware.com blog.

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A common issue after installing ESX servers that do not have all their NICs cabled is that you can not ping the host. For example, say you have an ESX host with 6 1GB network cards - 2 on board and 4 PCI. You would think that cabling the 2 on board cards would cover network connectivity. Unfortunately the order that ESX recognizes the NICs is not determined in a logical, expected order such as on board and then PCI cards. In fact, if you know how ESX determines how to order the network cards please comment and let us all know! In the meantime, here is how to use a few esxcfg- Console commands to make sure the cabled NICs are linked to the vSwitch that has the Service Console PortGroup (where the ip address is assigned).

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To clone a virtual machine with VirtualCenter you have to power off the guest, but what if your next maintenance window isn’t any time soon, you can’t afford to schedule the outage, or you just need a copy of the VM during normal business hours? Did you know that making a copy of a running, powered on VM is possible. At a high level the process requires a snapshot to freeze the VM’s original disk which in turn allows you to clone the frozen disk. This is essentially the way VCB, vRanger, or any of the live VM backup products work. Therefore, cloning a powered on VM can be accomplished with a little Console command magic.

I want to acknowledge that researching this method was inspired by the VMTN Virtualization Roundtable Episode 1 Podcast’s coverage of snapshots. Specifically Eric Siebert mentions that using VMware Converter as an alternative to committing snapshots is not the best option and offers the idea of using vmkfstools to do the job.

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John Troyer from VMTN has hosted the first podcast episode of VMware Communities Roundtable and has posted a summary of the call notes at VMware Communities Roundtable podcast #1 | VMTN Blog. I am honored to have one of my “things that make you go hmmmm” (on the Quick Migration vs VMotion discussion) posts listed as a reference for one of the topics of the episode.

John announces the new series and the objective of the Roundtable podcasts with the following summary:

“Each week, we’ll bring together experts and leaders from the VMware Communities and virtualization blogs to discuss the interesting topics in virtualization. Think of this as if it were a group meeting up at VMworld over a pint to chat about the latest news.”

The episode lasts somewhere between 50 minutes to an hour and is a recorded call between John and an attendee list consisting of some of the virtualization community’s top minds from all over the world. VMware Community profiles of the individuals contributing to episode 1 are:

• Steve Beaver - sbeaver
• Tom Howarth
• Alex Mittell - mittell
• Eric Siebert - esiebert7625
• Edward Haletky -Texiwill
• Dave Mishchenko

Go to John’s VMTN post to listen or download the podcast, but the following is my quick summary and take-aways from the call.

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Jason Perlow of blogs.zdnet.com has written a great feature comparison post of the 2 best multi-platform, free virtualization products in my opinion - Sun xVM VirtualBox 1.6 and VMware Server 2.0 Beta 2.

Personally, I used to run VMware Server 1.x on my XP notebook until I was tempted to try VMware’s first beta of version 2.0. Although not an officially supported OS for any version of VMware Server, my use of Server on XP was for basic research and test purposes, and I chose the free version over VMware Workstation. Like most, after the switch to 2.0 beta 1 I experienced frustration with the web interface. Now, since I discovered Sun’s xVM VirtualBox 1.6 seamless feature and the ability to run virtual machines created in VMware’s .vmdk format, I have switched. I am extremely happy with VirtualBox, and I even consider it to be a closer open-source replacement for VMware Workstation with features that rival the still in beta version of Workstation 6.5. I also use VirtualBox 1.6 on both 64 bit and 32 bit Ubuntu at home.

Jason’s comparison focuses on using the products in a true virtualization host capacity, and he provides some interesting performance analysis.

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Move over Lefthand Networks VSA, xtravirt.com has provided a free alternative for creating a virtual iSCSI SAN. Xtravirt Virtual SAN (XVS) is a virtual machine appliance that runs on two of your ESX hosts’ local VMFS datastores to create a single, synchronized iSCSI SAN. XVS allows the creation of ESX clusters for VI3 Enterprise features without purchasing a physical shared storage solution.

“The Xtravirt Virtual SAN (XVS) appliance for VMware ESX3 Server is a free solution to provide the benefits of shared VMFS storage without the cost of a SAN – this allows the utilisation of otherwise unused local storage in the ESX server to facilitate enterprise level features such as vMotion, DRS and HA normally only available through the use of a shared storage device. All volume data is synchronously replicated between hosts, providing full fail-over capability with data integrity in the event of host, disk or appliance failure.”

XVS is the perfectly priced storage solution for the home ESX test lab, small and mediium businesses, or the small remote branch office.

To download a copy of the virtual appliance and for more about XVS go to xtravirt.com.

updated 5.24.08

Currently XVS is only configurable as a single LUN across paired ESX hosts. A third ESX hosts can use the virtual ip address for it’s SAN, but the additional host(s) would not be using their local storage as part of the synchronized SAN. Future editions will hopefully expand the storage across more than 2 ESX hosts.

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I was helping a customer P2V a large development SQL server this week and ran into a VMFS configuration issue that failed the conversion. We were using the Converter Enterprise for VirtualCenter 2.5 plugin. Almost as soon as we kicked off the job it failed with an error starting with “file size is larger than the maximum size supported by datastore”. The VMFS LUN we were using as the target was an empty 1.5 TB volume, and the new VM consisted of 2 virtual disks that totaled roughly 450 GB. We had plenty of room, but the problem was not the available storage space. Instead, the issue was that we exceeded the maximum possible .vmdk size for the default VMFS 1MB block setting.

When you add new storage to an ESX host and you format the LUN with the VMFS file system you have to choose what block size setting you want to use. See the screenshot for the dropdown box used to make this choice. Notice the Maximum file size description supposedly provided to help you understand this setting. It’s hardly intuitive in my opinion, so let me try to translate - Choosing the block size determines what maximum possible .vmdk size can be created on this LUN.

If you do not change the default setting when you format a VMFS LUN

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Carlo Costanzo over at ipmer.com has a great post about how to quickly and easily solve issues resulting from VM snapshots. As Carlo points out, too many administrators misunderstand the ESX snapshot to be a point in time backup and unfortunately do not realize it is instead a live and growing file. More often than not the snapshot is forgotten until the LUN is completely out of space at which time the VM is unstable. Trying to commit the snapshot becomes a time consuming burden.

The post 70GB Snapshot, YIKES! explains how Carlo used some “outside of the box” thinking to use VMware Converter to rescue VMs without going through the commit process. The idea is so simple it’s brilliant! Carlo writes:

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Upgrading to ESX3.5 and VirtualCeter 2.5 Best Practices is a VMware KB article that lists best practice recommendations when performing the VI upgrade. As explained in the article:

This document provides additional steps which may be useful when upgrading to ESX 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5. It is assumed at this point that you have also read the Upgrade Guide.

Although the article contains 11 items in the list, in my opinion the last few are common steps (place the cd in the cd-rom drive of the host etc.) and not really best practices.
Regardless, review the following before performing the upgrade and follow these recommendations to minimize trouble.

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