Latest adventures with vSphere 5.0
I was lucky to have some free time over the last couple of weeks and upgraded my lab environment to vSphere ESXi 5.0. Just a little background on my home environment, it is a Dell PowerEdge T105. As usual, I checked the HCL list on VMware's site to see it it was on there for 5.0. It was not, but I did a bunch of googling and saw that many people were successful in installing/upgrading on hardware that was on the 4.x HCL. I figured since I installed all of this on a USB key, that worse case scenario, I just re-install 4.1 if it FUBAR my server. My VMs (important ones) where on an eSATA datastore drive array, so I felt pretty safe. Also one of my goals was to screen shot the upgrade, but alas if anybody saw my twitter when I did this, the install went so quickly, I wasn't able to take anything useful.
Anyways, I am happy to say that the upgrade worked great, all of my VMs fired up and was able to start upgrading the VMtools on machines that were using it. So on to playing with some of the new features. First thing I tried was enabling the USB connection on my server for VMs. I had an older USB legacy IDE drive enclosure around (about a TB) from my old Windows 2003 server. I always had to plug it into a workstation to pull up anything on it, a real pain. It was primarily setup for simple backups or stuff I just didn't want laying around on cramped disk space workstations, so it was something I would like running off a server if possible. Well I turned it on the device, added the USB virtual hardware to my Windows 2008 R2 VM, and the popup in the system tray found it right away. I was browsing the drive within a minute. Nice! For anybody that wants a quick write on adding USB devices, here you go from TechnoDrone. Once I clean up the drives, I want to test it out on my FreeNAS VM.
Also, for the curious, I found there is a way to run ESXi 5.0 within your existing 4.1 environment in case you do not have the available hardware, or just would like to do a POC. I was initially thinking of doing this, but just went for the whole enchilada since this was only a test lab. Also, if you were thinking of doing Hyper-V within ESXi 5.0, yep, supposedly doable as well. Also note, they say it works with VMware Workstation 8 as well (which I would love to get my hands on and work with).
What I would like to do for testing, is you my Dell T105 as one environment, and my laptop as another. My laptop has 8gigs of RAM so I can setup a modest/scaled down box so I can run through vMotion and Storage vMotion scenarios. I have a gigabit Dell 2808 PowerConnect switch and a gigabit Ethernet port on my laptop, so I am hopeful I can get some decent speed out of that environment.
Yes Virgina, I still watch the blog…
Sadly though work and other commitments make it next to impossible for me to be as active as I would like to be. I mean, my last real post was over a year ago! Also what I do for a living (still IT related) has shifted a bit, so I am not always in the *know* as much as I would like.
I haven't done any artwork for almost a year as well. I just recently (like a couple days ago) checked my deviant art account. I had way to messages on there to even think about responding yet (if even).
Sigh. Well, I am still going to keep the site up and running. I can see that a few of my posts are still generating traffic, and who knows, maybe something will happen time wise and give me that extra push to start participating in my own blog again.
For all the visitors, thanks! I am glad that some of my posts have been useful for people. Reason why I started this whole thing up, to give back to the community that has helped me time and time again.
Until my next *real* post, cheers!
My Netbook and Ubuntu Linux
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A couple of weekends ago I was working on my Asus 901 netbook, and it was just running dog slow and spitting up multiple errors at boot after logging in. I loaded Windows 7 on it (using nlite) last summer, which was kind of a pain to load, but was a fun experiment and got my feat wet with Windows 7. Initially Windows 7 worked OK, but just started to slow down and give out random errors, then I would get Windows Update notifications that would not install for various reasons. It was becoming frustrating, as at times I just wanted to boot the thing up and check my e-mail or send out a tweet.
The netbook's drives where a 4GB and 16GB. There might be ways around it now, but I had to load the Windows OS partition on the 4GB drive and do multiple links to program files on the 16GB partition. I upgraded the netbook to the max physical memory allowed, 2GB, but that was really the only thing I did to it. I also had a heck of a time searching out drivers for the Asus that would work properly. Again, to be fair, this was last summer so there may be a better way to do this now.
I browsed around on the web, contemplated various linux distributions (eeebuntu, which I think is now Aurora and easypeasy was another, and a slew of others). I decided to try out Ubuntu 10.04, the netbook edition, from a USB thumb drive to see how it would work. I picked the netbook version of Ubuntu because I didn't see a need to load a bunch of applications that I wouldn't be using my netbook for. I primarily use my netbook to check e-mail, surf the web, etc, not any real "hardcore" stuff. I backed up the original netbook, then downloaded a copy of Ubuntu, and got a running copy going on a USB thumb drive. After the first boot up, I was hooked. I was amazed at how things just worked. No messing around with drivers. The netbook's wifi found my access point, I entered in my security info, and was out on in the Internet in seconds. After playing around with it for about a hour, I decided to select the install feature from the system menu, and had a clean system loaded in about 30 minutes.
I really like Windows 7, but after seeing what this did for my netbook, for me making it useful again, I am contemplating trying it out on my desktop (the full version) at home as well. I don't really play video intensive games anymore (no time, grrr), so this maybe the way to go. It is an older machine, so I might be able to get a few more years of life out of it. I really like the fact I can try it out on a USB thumb drive and give a run through its hoops.
For reference, take a look at this blog for tweaking certain things for your SSD drives and this article for how to load the eee-control features as well.
Home/Small Office VPN Solution – OpenVPN
A few months ago I was asked by a couple of people, “What is a good product for connecting remotely to my machines at work/home, but isn’t going to cost me a bundle”. Good question, as I really never had a solid utility for my home lab environment. At work, we have always had some sort of enterprise VPN product like CheckPoint, F5, or Sonicwall. So I did some searching around, and of course there are many solutions out there. The criteria I was setting for myself was I wanted something somewhat easy to install, preferably open source, and something that could expand and/or grow if needed. I also wanted something that would work with my Windows boxes and Linux boxes. After playing around with a couple of products, I settled on OpenVPN (http://openvpn.net). The access server is available as Linux or Windows, or as a VMware or VHD appliance. The clients available are for Linux, Mac, and Windows. The server install was rather simple as I just downloaded and VMware image and added it to my existing ESXi environment. Made the proper changes after the install and on my firewalls and that was good to go. Of course you have to make sure you register so you can get your free 2 clients. The client software was pretty much the same. I loaded it on my Windows 7 laptop and my Linux netbook. I also tested it on Windows XP and no complaints there as well. The web GUI interface for the admin piece was pretty straight forward. Only problem I had going on was with setting up the profiles for downloading the client. Once I figured that out, I was good to go. Also one of the other things I really liked about the product is I could really test drive it and buy more licenses as I saw fit. Right now I don't have a need for more than two connections, but that could change. I think this could be a happy medium solution for some home office/small business environments. They also have a pretty good community out there for help in case you get stuck.
Windows Server 2008 Only Comes on DVD
PLEASE NOTE, I TAKE NO CREDIT FOR WRITING THIS ARTICLE, ITS ORIGINS ARE/WERE FROM geekeleet.com. IT SEEMS TO BE DOWN AND MY REFERENCED LINKS TO IT WERE FAILING SO I HAVE REPOSTED WHAT THEY HAVE HERE. THAT IS ALL.
Well, last week I took my first stab at installing the all new Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn). I must say that I was very frustrated when, a week later, it still wasn't happily installed and working. I ran into a couple of problems and I'm going to share them with you in the hopes that I might save you from the same aggravation that I endured.I'm an MSDN and TechNet subscriber, so I have access to the downloads of these products a few weeks before the general public. I downloaded the English .iso and proceeded to burn it to disk. When I took that disk to my server to install it, I hit my first hurdle. It seems that the install disk for Windows Server 2008 only comes on DVD; the server is only equipped with a cd-rom. I had a lot of ideas on how to fix this, but many of them didn't pan out. I didn't have a large enough USB drive to create an install disk from, nor could I find anything on the web to solve my problem. Suddenly, I was struck with the idea of the century, install from my network! I copied the contents of the Server 2008 DVD to a common share on my network and searched for a boot disk to load the network from. I tried loading a copy of WinPE 2004 (Windows Pre-installation Environment), which loaded just fine, however it threw up an error message when I tried to install Server 2008. It would seem that the version of WinPE that I was using didn't support Vista or Server 2008 installations.
After much hunting I discovered that there is a WinPE version 2.0, however I had no luck finding a copy that I could download. Nope, the community wasn't going to help me with this one, so I set out to create my own. It actually wasn't that hard. You do need to have a Vista installation running somewhere to create the WinPE disk that will get you going. For those of you who don't know, WinPE is actually a replacement for DOS to some degree. When you boot from the Vista or Server 2008 install disk, you are actually loading a WinPE environment, rather than a DOS one. Think of it like a really compact version of the Vista kernel.
To build your own WinPE 2.0 disk, you have to start by downloading the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK). Warning!!! Downloading this software does require you to validate your copy of Windows. Just in case you happen to be one of the minorities that pirate software, I thought you should know. Otherwise, download the software and install it using the wizard provided. Once you have completed all of that, follow these instructions to create your disk:
- Launch the "Windows PE Tools Command Prompt" from the start menu (Start --> All Programs --> Microsoft Windows AIK)
- At the command prompt, type COPYPE.CMD x86 c:tempx86_PE (command | version | destination folder) and press <enter>
Note: the destination directory should not already exist.
- Once the process completes, create a .iso by entering OSCDIMG -bc:tempx86_peetfsboot.com -n -o c:tempx86_peiso c:tempx86_pe.iso and pressing <enter>
- Now you can burn the image to a disk with your favourite burning software (Roxio, Nero, etc.)
- You're done!
Now you have a WinPE 2.0 boot disk. Once you boot to it, it will look like a fancy Vista background and a command prompt. If you are network installing like I am, you need to mount the network share so that the install can take place. That part is easy, just type:
net use z: \computernamefoldername
or net use z: \computernamefoldername domainpassword /USER:domainuser (if you are using a secured domain share)
Now you can type z:setup and you will be on your way to installing Server 2008. This technique also works for Vista for those of you having a similar problem there!