By mike
So I’ve been restoring some Windows servers from NetApp snapshots today, specifically single hard disks that had been having problems (long story involving Windows problems, etc). I found this pretty easy to do once I got the syntax down – basically, all I was looking to do was to restore the C: of a server, but keep it’s D: intact – that way I’d keep the most recent data, in this case some SQL files, but could roll back to a point where the Windows OS was a little less hosed up. Mostly for my own quick reference in the future, this is how I cranked a bunch of these out.
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By mike
…when I flipped the page over on my desk calendar this morning and noticed that the January 31st Virtualization Tip of the Day from the fine folks at PrintedOwl.com has this to say:
It’s a best practice to keep the number of COS software installations to a minimum. Here’s a case that’s justified for some environments to ensure graceful host shutdowns. Mike at motogobi has done some leg work & put up a procedure: http://www.motogobi.com/2008/11/13/setting-up-powerchute-network-shutdown-in-vmware-esx-35/
I’m flattered 
By mike
So, on the heels of my post pointing out some tips on ways to increase the chances of successful physical-to-virtual conversions using VMWare’s Converter, you’ve decided to take the plunge and get rid of all those PowerEdge 2600’s you’ve got lying around.
Good for you! You’ve successfully finished a clone of your server’s physical hard drive(s), and the conversion process is almost done. BUT: At anywhere between 94% and 99%, the VMWare Converter console shows a failed conversion at reconfiguring your target virtual machine. So you switch to your VM and try to just power it on: BSOD. What now?
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By mike
One of the tasks I’ve been working on for the past two months has been the conversion of a large number of physical servers to virtual machines using VMWare’s Converter 4.0. Once again, VMWare offers up a free product to get you sucked into it’s technology. I’ve used other P2V tools in the past, some paid for, and the technology has come a mighty long way.
For a free product, I’ve got to say this is an amazing piece of software and pretty bombproof if some basic steps are taken to maximize the chances of success with using it. I hope to outline some basic steps you can take in order to up those chances, focusing on Windows 2000 and 2003. I can tell you I wish I had known a lot of this info previously when having performed some other clones… Read more »
By mike
I’ve found that two things get in the way of updating this site: skiing and starting a new job. I mean, being married and having a very active dog and wife and it being prime motorbike weather doesn’t usually put as much of a crimp on at least posting some new pics of the most recent ski season, but with this new position I’ve most definitely stepped into the major leagues. I’ve been working on an ESX deployment that takes virtualization to an entirely new level that I’ve never experienced before – DRS, HA, NetApp NFS storage with snapshotting, and much much higher uptime expectations from my customers. It’s exciting, if terrifying at the same time. 
By mike
EDIT: as of 3/1/2009, my free license for esXpress expired, and unfortunately – although the GUI interface still lists an available option as “FREE” as far as licensing goes – esXpress will not work in free mode after your trial license expires. They really need to update their GUI to reflect this and not just blame this on “There was an old document on the web site that had incorrect information, that has now been corrected.” Disappointing to say the least. With that said…
I run a decent-sized, fairly simple ESX environment as I’ve mentioned before – so simple, in fact, that the powers that be feel I’m fine admin’ing at all alone.
Something I’d been struggling with for a while was an easy, straightforward way to back up all the VMs that we have in place – and I had originally sought to rely on Vizioncore’s vRanger Pro. However, I’ve been using that product for a few weeks in evaluation and have come away disappointed – when trying to run multiple backups with the product installed on my VirtualCenter server, I ran into too many (seemingly) .NET-related errors to be reliable. Instead, I set up a second Windows machine dedicated to VM backups – a more expensive option, even considering Vizioncore’s relatively low price point.
Well, enter TechTarget’s Best Virtualization Products of 2008 in which they rate PHD Technologies’ esXpress, v3.1 at the top of the bunch – so I tried it out. And boy, color me impressed.
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By mike
Click for larger, more confusing view
Virtual Geek has an amazingly insightful post combining multiple presentations and points from representatives from EMC, MVWare, NetApp, Dell/Equalogic, HP/Lefthand, and some other folks in the business. As you can see by the names involved, we’re talking about most every major virtualization storage player in the industry today – and they’re here to help us make heads or tails of iSCSI storage. You’ll even be able to make sense of that diagram above after reading:
As discussed earlier, the ESX 3.x software initiator really only works on a single TCP connection for each target – so all traffic to a single iSCSI Target will use a single logical interface. Without extra design measures, it does limit the amount of IO available to each iSCSI target to roughly 120 – 160 MBs of read and write access.
This design does not limit the total amount of I/O bandwidth available to an ESX host configured with multiple GbE links for iSCSI traffic (or more generally VMKernel traffic) connecting to multiple datastores across multiple iSCSI targets, but does for a single iSCSI target without taking extra steps.
Here are the questions that customers usually ask themselves:
Question 1: How do I configure MPIO (in this case, VMware NMP) and my iSCSI targets and LUNs to get the most optimal use of my network infrastructure? How do I scale that up?
Question 2: If I have a single LUN that needs really high bandwidth – more than 160MBps and I can’t wait for the next major ESX version, how do I do that?
Question 3: Do I use the Software Initiator or the Hardware Initiator?
Question 4: Do I use Link Aggregation and if so, how?
Here are the answers you seek…
By mike
It’s inevitable: hard drives just fall by the wayside. Even more so with the switch from IDE to SATA over the last couple of years. Where I work, large amounts of data had been stored on single spinning IDE disks (bad), so one of my goals was to migrate that data to redundant arrays for better protection. OK, that’s fine. But what to do with the oddly-sized 500 and 750gig IDE hard drives that end up in a pile on your desk?
One word: NAS. (okay, so it’s an acronym for Network Attached Storage)
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By mike
I currently admin a sizable VMWare ESX deployment hosting a couple dozen domains and over a hundred Windows servers. Most are for testing and could be rebuilt pretty quickly, but some are for production deployment – at least one of which is fairly irreplaceable. This past summer our office suffered some extended outages due to city-wide power interruptions, so it was a no-brainer to approve the purchase of PowerChute services for these servers. Turns out, APC is lagging a little on getting an ESX 3.5-compatible current version of PCNS out there so I decided to get v2.2.1 running on my five ESX hosts.
Here’s how I did it – mostly for my own future reference: Read more »
