vmware

Running 16 bit applications in a 64 bit OS

So as many know Microsoft did not include any support for 16 bit applications in it’s 64 bit windows Operating Systems. What does this mean if you want to have a 64 bit OS but still need to run 16 bit applications? Well you have a couple of choices.

You could certainly use a product like VMware workstation or HyperV or such to run a virtual machine within your system that uses a guest OS that can run the software. This is a great solution but not a free solution.

If you are looking for a free solution I can recommend using an application called DosBox  http://www.dosbox.com/). This runs great inside my Vista 64 box and is completely free. I highly recommend it.

Setting up Websense on a Virtual machine

Ok so I was setting up a Websense VM in standalone mode and there are a few things that you need to do to make this work.

So, part of a Websense implementation includes setting up port spanning/mirroring on a port that connects to you monitor NIC so that it recieves all the traffic from your firewall. In ESX you will need to create a vSwitch for the Websense monitor network and allocate one of your physical NIC’s to to it which will plug into your mirror port on the switch.

The important step in creating this vSwitch is to go into the properties and enable it to act in promiscous mode, if you do not do this then your monitor vNic will not see any traffic.

After that just configure the second virtual NIC on your Websense VM to be a part of your Websense monitor network and Bob’s your uncle.

Unable to power on a VM: Corrupt Redo log

Here is a sample of the error that you will see.

Error message: msg.hbacommon.corruptredo:The redolog of dmz-obs-000002.vmdk has been detected to be corrupt. The virtual machine needs to be powered on. If the problem still persists, you need to discard the redolog.

You will not be able to power off or reset the VM. You need to kill it manually.

Here is how you do that:

Instructions on how to foracbly terminate a VM if it is unresponsive to the VI client.

In this you will be terminating the Master World and User Worlds for the VM which in turn will terminate the VM’s processes.

1. First list the running VMs to determine the VM ID for the affected VM:
#cat /proc/vmware/vm/*/names

vmid=1076 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/50823edc-d9110dd9-8994-9ee0ad055a68/vc using sql/vc using sql.vmx” uuid=”50 28 4e 99 3d 2b 8d a0-a4 c0 87 c9 8a 60 d2 31″ displayName=”vc using sql-192.168.1.10″

vmid=1093 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/50823edc-d9110dd9-8994-9ee0ad055a68/esx_template/esx_template.vmx” uuid=”50 11 7a fc bd ec 0f f4-cb 30 32 a5 c0 3a 01 09″ displayName=”esx_template”

The displayname will be the name of your VM as it appears in the GUI

For this example we will terminate the VM at vmid=’1605′

2. We need to find the Master World ID, do this type:
# less -S /proc/vmware/vm/1605/cpu/status

Replace the number in this command with your vmid from above.

Expand the terminal or scroll until you can see the right-most column. This is labelled ‘group’. Unterneath the column you will find: vm.1604

In this example ‘1604′ is the ID of the Master World.

3. Run this command to terminate the Master World and the VM running in it:

/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmkload_app –kill 9 1604

4. This should kill all the VM’s User Worlds and also the VM’s processes.

If Successful you will see similar:

Warning: Jul 12 07:24:06.303: Sending signal ‘9′ to world 1604.

You should then be able to work with your VM again

Shutdown a frozen VM

I was assisting a peer of mine with this issue. He had a VM where the guest OS froze. He attempted to shut off the VM but that also froze at 95%. He was then unable to do anything with the VM. We did some searching and found a way to force the VM offline from the command line which allowed us to then power the VM back on and everythign was fine.

Here is the link:

 http://www.vmware.com/support/esx21/doc/…

VMware develops rival protocol to ICA to compete in the VDI market space

One of the exciting (and long overdue) announcements from VMware is there development of a new PCoIP protocol for use in the VMware View product. This protocol will be replacing their use of RDP. One of Citrix’s big claims to fame in this market space with it’s Xendesktop product is it’s use of the ICA protocol which is far and away the superior protocol over RDP.

Good on Vmware for taking the fight to Citrix. I think this fight will go a few arounds so sit back, relax, and enjoy the match.

Epic Technology Day - April 21st, 2009

For those not familiar with this event, my company hosts a bi-yearly technology day seminar. It’s a great free event with lots of interesting and informative seminars presented by companies like Cisco, VMware, Citrix, HP and others.  The next one is coming up on April 21st in Winnipeg and the 23rd in Saskatoon.

If you are going to be in one of these area’s you should register to come and take a look

Go here to check out the seminar list and to register:

 http://www.epic.ca/events.asp

VM Converter - FAILED: A general system error occurred: The file is too big for the filesystem

I recently got this error while trying to P2V a server. The reason? On default settings when setting up a VMFS volume (block size 1) the maximum size of a virtual disk is 256 GB’s.

Now what can you do to fix this? Well sad answer is you can reformat you VMFS volume with a different block size.

Block size Max Virtual Disk size
1 256 GB
2 512 GB
4 1024 GB
8 2048 GB

If that isn’t something you care to do then keep in mind by default VM Converter will take the maximum size of each volume on your physical server (c,d,e, etc) and lump them all into one physical disks. You can however go into the settings and create a virtual disk for each volume (something I recommend doing regardless). You can also adjust the size of the target virtual disk to eliminate free space, IE if your D drive is 325 GB but has 80 GB free then by default it will try to create a 325 GB virtual disk (and fail) but you can adjust the virtual disk size down to 245 GB.

Hope this helps

Switching VM’s over to a different Virtual Center breaks connection between BES and Exchange server

We had an issue with our BES server stop working properly. Some mail was getting to users but there were errors sending mail and we couldn’t activate any new users.

Here was the error when trying to activate.

{e} MAPIMailbox::MAPIMailbox(2) - OpenMsgStore (0×8004011d) failed

A reboot of the exchange server followed by a reboot of the BES server fixed the issues but we weren’t sure if this was a coincidence or caused by switching the VM’s over to a different Virtual Center server

Shortly after that we moved over a different set of Exchange server and BES servers and the exact same issue occurred.

Be aware!

HP ProLiant is Highest Performing Server in Latest VMmark Comparison

HP ProLiant is Highest Performing Server in Latest VMmark Comparison

Check out the results here:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html

The HP servers scored the highest performance results when running VMware in comparison to multiple other vendors including Dell and IBM. Certainly some food for thought when purchasing your next physical server.

Installing HP Insight Manager on a ESX box

I found this very useful blog entry on instaling the HP SIM on ESX. The HP site has the install files but no acutal instructions on how to do the install. This can be very useful because as a consultant we rely on the ability to remotely administer servers but this is useful for any administrator.  Check it out;

 http://discardme.com/blog/2009/01/22/ins…