Your customer want you to add a new volume in one of the VM Windows server but can not affort down time? No worry, you can do that easily with ESX.
Below is step by step guide with screen captured from the VM (my test machine is running on Windows 2003 Enterprise):
Tip: It is best to do a snapshot before you start this task, incase anything goes wrong.
1) This is my test VM machine. It is having one disk at beginning.
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Posted on October 20th, 2008 in Tips | 1 Comment »
Few days ago, one of my virtual center machine was crashed and my Microsoft SQL database was corrupted without backup(damm!).
Basically setting up a brand new Windows 2003 machine is pretty simple but setup a new Virtual Machine took me 2 days. The most important is my VM template is go missing. The quick solution is search for VM template and register (add to inventory) again.
SSH into my ESX server using putty and search for VM template file with extension “.vmtx”.
[root@malaysiavmesx01 vmfs]# find /vmfs -name *.vmtx
/vmfs/volumes/465eeddb-89b75750-a52d-011aa0289d15/W2K3STD/W2K3STD.vmtx
/vmfs/volumes/465eeda7-2a63d436-724b-011aa0289d15/RHEL5/RHEL5.vmtx
How to register a VM template using CLI:
[root@malaysiavmesx01 vmfs]# /usr/bin/vmware-cmd -s register
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Yesterday Craig mentioned about 8 VCPU per VM on Citrix XenServer 5 is really a good stuff from Citrix and I must admit that.
I did a quick test and I would like to share my personal review about Citrix XenServer 5.0:
Personally I think network speed is fast compare to VMware ESX. I have a physical 1Gbps NIC network speed and I can get 2Gbps network speed after install XenTools on Windows 2008 server but require 2 times reboot(SuSE Linux require 1 reboot). Anyway VM guest shutdown and reboot process is faster than VMware ESX.
I was try to install SuSE Linux 10 using 4 ISO CD (both NFS or CIFS), the Citrix XenServer always give me an error “The VM rejected the attempt to detach the device xxxxx refusing to close” when switch ISO CD1 to ISO CD2. You have to extract 4 ISO CD into one single location to make it work or copy ISO to local storage(provider you have enough local disk space).
The enterprise product should not have similar issue and this is not make sense at all.
Anyway, you can try alternative way using “Install URL” instead of using ISO Image once you have extract ISO CD into single folder on your web server.
Install URL: http://xx.xx.xx.xx/inst/10/32/SP2/ALL
Advanced Boot OS Parameters:
console=ttyS0 xencons=ttyS hostip=xx.xx.xx.xx/24 gateway=xx.xx.xx.xx dnsserver=xx.xx.xx.xx
Please make sure your have correct IP, gateway and DNS setup properly else you will getting error during installation.
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Finally, Microsoft had included VMware as their future support road map instead of hold up the customer from moving their server to VMware.
Participating Vendors
The following companies who supply server virtualization software to the marketplace have formally committed to participate in the Server Virtualization Validation Program. Microsoft is working with them to validate their solutions as platforms for Windows Server 2008. Please contact them directly for any additional information.
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Latest news from microsoft had announced to revise the licensing program for virtual machines which run the Windows servers. 1 of the critical comment do upset a lot of the potential customer to further increase the volume of the windows server in thier environment.
Microsoft said they will support the windows machine which run on virtual server, but they refuse to support the VM which run on VMware. As consumer point of view, that will really as a show stopper to a lot of the potential customer to host thier production environment with more windows server in the future.
Compare Microsoft with Novell SUSE Linux, Novell really do a great job providing full support to the customer who have subscript for support every year, and they will support any virtualization platform that you will host your SUSE Linux.
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