Does this mean you have to blow away your Windows 7 installation to try it out? Of course not! In this day and age of virtualization, we have VMware on our side! Using VMware products you can easily test out the Windows 8 Consumer preview without blowing away your existing installation.

For instructions, please go here.

-RP

You know, I don’t mind mythbusting if it’s done properly, but these guys were all over the place. They were referencing products that aren’t even out yet and generally making fools of themselves. It’s no secret that I am a VMware fan and believe that VMware is the best solution for virtualization, but I still do believe that the other solutions have their place. I sincerely wish that Microsoft had taken their time to release something like this properly without making it look like they were shooting from the hip. It’s just embarrasing.

One of the things they talk about is memory overcommit and how it’s not really a big deal. Wow, is that a bunch of hot air or what. The moment Microsoft figures out how to do this themselves they will be talking about the virtues of Memory overcommit, just like they’re doing with Live migration now.

You can see VMware’s response to this video here.

Anyways, make sure you watch the video, it’s great for a laugh and shows you how desperate Microsoft really is.

-RP

NFS is a great solution to use along with the ghettoVCB scripts I mentioned in my previous posts. This way you can backup your virtual machines to USB storage connected to a workstation or server.

Well my trial is over and I have now purchased it for use in my home lab. I have to say it works flawlessly. I experimented with some free NFS software that is out there but nothing seemed to work perfectly. I found that a lot of products would just stop working after a period of time and then you’d have to restart the service or program in question.

Allegro NFS is pretty easy to configure. You start the program, you specify the windows path name you want to share out via NFS, then you specify the hosts and rights you want to give to the share. Then you just go to your client computer and mount the NFS share as you normally would. Pretty straightforward, it doesn’t get any easier than this. This is a great solution for users using workstation operating systems such as Windows Vista to share out external USB drives as NAS storage.

However if you want to use a workable free solution in your server environment then I would suggest using the Windows Services for Unix download with your Windows 2003 install. To get this working please do the following:

• Download the files /etc/passwd and /etc/group from your ESX or ESXi server using WinSCP
• Create a folder on your C drive called c:\nfs and place the passwd and group files in there
• Download Windows Services for Unix 3.5 from here and install it
• Make sure you install the Server for NFS and User Mapping components during the install
• During the user mapping configuration portion of the install, choose Local User Name Mapping Server and choose Password and Group files
• In the User Name mapping screen type in the path name for the passwd and group files (c:\nfs\passwd and c:\nfs\group)
• After it’s installed, click on Start and Run then type MMC
• Add the Windows Services for Unix Snap-in to the MMC console
• Select User Name Mapping on the left hand pane and then select the MAPS section in the right hand pane
• Ensure Simple Maps is checked and then click on Show User Maps
• Then click on list Windows Users and list UNIX users
• Select Administrator from the Windows user list and select root from the UNIX users list and then click Add
• Check the Display simple maps in Mapped users list checkbox
• Click on Apply in the top right hand corner of the MMC console
• Close the MMC console
• Create a folder and right click on it and choose Sharing and Security
• Click on the NFS Sharing tab
• Click share this folder and give it a share name, in this example we’ll call it NFSBackup
• Click on permissions
• Check the Allow root access box
• Change the Type of Access drop down menu to Read-Write and then click OK and then click OK again

Now you can mount the share from VMware. When you go to add NFS storage just point it at the IP of the server and the path. So if the server’s IP address is 192.168.1.10 for example, then the serer name would be 192.168.1.10 and the NFS path would be /NFSBackup.

That’s it!

-Cheers, RP

In my last blog post I spoke of a program called Plink. Plink is a command line interface to Putty. This allows us to connect to an SSH session from the command line. This can be leveraged using batch scripting and windows scheduled tasks to schedule ESXi jobs.

For my example I will show you how to schedule the ghettoVCB.sh script I spoke about in my last blog entry. Please see my detailed instructions on how to do this in my blog post here.

-RP

So in order to implement this script you will first have to enable SSH access to the ESXi server. You can do this by following my enable SSH instructions in my blog post here.

Then after you have enabled SSH, please follow my detailed instructions in my blog post here.

-Cheers, RP

File level backups are self explantory, they are the backups you run with backup software to backup the individual files, folders and system state data on a server. Everyone should already be doing these kinds of backups.

Virtual machine level backups are backups of the entire virtual machine itself. Virtual machine backups consist of the actual files that make up the entire virtual machine. For example in the case of VMware, the vmdk and vmx files for example. By backing these files up, you can restore the entire virtual machine to another location if your ESX server and the storage area that holds the virtual machine blows up. You can install a new ESX server and restore the entire virtual machine to a new storage location managed by a new ESX host.

One of my favorite products to do this is the free script from William Lam called GhettoVCB. You can read more details about it in my post here.

-RP

Why do you need access to the console? With access to the console this gives you the ability to troubleshoot larger support issues when things aren’t working the way they should and it also enables you to run some pretty cool scripts that are available out there on the Internet.

The ESXi console uses BusyBox so it is different from ESX even after you get console access. To enable SSH access to the shell, please do the following:

• From the ESXi console hit Alt-F1
• Type in the word unsupported and hit enter (you will not see the characters appear on the screen)
• Type in your root password
• Edit the /etc/inetd.conf file by typing in vi /etc/inetd.conf
• Scroll through the file until you find the line that says #ssh and delete the # sign
• Save the file
• Now you can reboot the ESXi server and you will have shell access
• Alternatively you can run the /sbin/services.sh restart command to restart the management services without rebooting the box.

-RP

 Here are a few tips to follow when power planning:

• Always get dual power supplies for your servers, it doesn’t cost much more to purchase these and it’s worth the extra money.
• Always plug dual power supplies into separate UPS’ and plug the UPS’ into separate circuits. There is no point plugging them into the same UPS and/or circuit. This gives you a single point of failure and basically defeats the purpose of having two power supplies in the first place.
• Power strips for racks with readouts for the amount of amps being drawn are great for seeing how much of a load your are placing on circuit. Many different companies sell these.
• A cheap meter for measuring the draw on a piece of equipment can be your best friend in troubleshooting issues. Sometimes a large enough power spike during boot up can trip a breaker and you can use a meter to determine what’s going on.
• Use an online power calculator before your installation day to determine how many circuits, UPS’, power cords, etc. you will need for all of your equipment. Then budget accordingly. It can be quite embarrasing if you don’t think about this beforehand and you get stuck up the creek without a paddle on the implementation day.
• If you are worried about increased power costs, look into blade systems and virtualization. The amount of money and energy you can save is quite substantial.
• Do some reading on electricity if you don’t understand all the terms. There are plenty of resources out there on the web.

-RP

Just recently I ran into this problem while running some testing and was able to do it by choosing to install VMWare tools first and then changing drive letters to the d:. Then I ran the setup.exe file to start the VMWare Tools installer.

This started the VMWare Tools gui. However this throws a DLL error on the screen. Just go to task manager during the install and kill the rundll process. Then click past any errors and the install should finish without a hitch. I used the “typical” install mode.

Then reboot the virtual machine and when the server comes back up you should have a working guest os with Windows Server 2008 Core and VMWare Tools installed!

-RP

Of course buying a brand new server just for BES isn’t exactly cost effective. This is where virtualization comes in. Using VMWare you can easily setup a tiny VM with minimal resources just for BES. The downside to this however is that how are you going to plug in a BlackBerry directly to the BES server via USB cable if you need to troubleshoot a BlackBerry device that isn’t synchronizing properly wirelessly?

Well the solution to this is actually pretty straightforward. In most virtualized environments you will usually have one server that is not virtual (a management server as I like to call them), that allows you to manage the virtualized environment with all the administration tools installed on it and perhaps even backup software to backup or replicate the virtual machines to another location. On this same server you can just install the Blackberry Management console and point it at the BES server. This way you can plug in USB devices to the physical management server and the devices will communicate with your virtual BES server.

-RP