Alfred's Ramblings

This sounds a bit weird. If you have VMware server running on Windows 2003 SP2, you might encounter connection problems from the guest. I have tested using Window shares or UNC paths.

A customer have a bunch of really old Compaq servers running, you guess it a mission critical application that nobody knows how to reinstall. So I convinced them to virtualize the machines as a business continuity plan. That way hardware failure will not affect applications.

VMware converter CD and the following:

1. Linux Live CD, eg Ubuntu, not UBCD.
2. Hiren CD, for TestDisk to read partition information.
3. Boot.ini configuration
4. Installed SCSI adapter type.

On powering up the virtual servers, they keep hanging. Strangely they use to be working just a few minutes ago?

I was looking through the VMware website and stumbled on the free version of ESX (since 28 Jul 08). So I thought I do a test drive together with some of the very old VM Server images.

I need some face time with Exchange 2007. My previous two attempts to run it off the company's data center servers, almost always got hijacked.

The number of guest OSes that can be hosted is limited by CPU power, RAM, harddisks and network bandwidth.

VMware server bridges the guest OSes on the first physical network adapter. If you have several small virtual servers, it is possible for a single network connection to be flooded.

Sometimes you need to control the guest OS or the virtuals by script. Good example is stopping all the guests or virtuals to take a backup. For VMware server, this is controlled by using Perl script via vmware-cmd.

The pre-requisite is the installation of VMTools. Yes it will work even if vmhgfs and vmxnet are not available.

This looks simple from the start. Install a Symantec Backup Exec 11d media server, a Remote Agent for Linux and Unix Servers (RALUS) inside the ESX server. Run a backup job and its done!

And then some.

Installed my first ESX server on a HP DL380 G5, quite an interesting experience. Overall the process is very smooth. The server is a standard edition, so I just accepted all the suggested defaults. My datastore is going to be on an iSCSI enabled NAS server, so the installer defaults will not affect the datastore. Note that the Qlogic iSCSI card should be PCI-X as the ESX 3.02 installer does not recognize the PCI-e cards. The one I used was QLA 40222. Strangely not listed on the website.

The network for the iSCSI traffic should be on its own private LAN for reliability and throughput. Ideally, seperate NICs and switches as the traffic is really high.