ESXi is what is called a “bare metal hyper visor.” Looks a lot like *nix to me, but it is definitely the bare minimum to keep things going and host virtual machines. It is also free — and I’m a big fan of free!

We have been running VMware Server 2 (also free) hosted on a Windows 2003 server for about two years now but it has been a bit sluggish of late. The hardware isn’t great — a pair of hyper-threaded Xeon 3.0 Ghz procs, 6 GB of RAM and a bunch of 7200 RPM SATA drives in RAID 1+0. More memory would’ve helped but the server is of a vintage where that old memory is actually quite expensive. This box used to be a database server and I’m pleased that it ran as well as it did. Great way to extend the usability of some old hardware, but it was time to move on.

This week a much more modern server was freed up. This one is an HP DL380 G5. Dual quad-core procs and 12 GB of RAM. A pair of 36 GB drives mirrored and 4 more 280 GB drives in RAID 1+0 — all the drives are 10 K RPM too. More cores, twice the ram and faster drives. Definitely a step up from where we’ve been. Not bad for a couple year old box.

The ESXi install was completely uneventful. I watched it draw dots on the screen for a bit, answered a few questions and watched it boot up for the first time. Slick, easy and painless.

So there I am with 4 VM’s on the older server that I want to be on the new server. How to move them? I opted to go the Converter route. I shut down each machine then pointed the converter at the files. It knew they were VMware machines from Server. Then I pointed it at the ESXi server as the target and turned it loose. It worked well enough but it took many hours to do all the VMs. I made sure my machine (running Converter) and both servers were on the same gigabit switch but that didn’t make as much difference as I had hoped.

On the second attempt I thought things would speed up if I ran Converter on the old VMware Server — the data wouldn’t have to pass through my machine (I had noticed a large amount of network traffic on my machine while running the first conversion). Unfortunately, thanks to the “large file copy issues” of Windows 2003 (see this post and last comments for more info) the server very quickly ran out of memory only about 20% into the job.

I restarted the second copy from my machine and figured I’d copy the 3rd machine to a USB drive while the second was converting. That way the third conversion would have the source files locally. Alas, doing a conversion of one while copying files for another just slowed both down too much. I sucked it up and stopped looking for shortcuts and just finished them.

After the conversions, I was a bit startled to have to reactivate the windows machines. I’ve done a fair number of physical to virtual conversions and rarely hit that issue (except when using OEM licenses on some desktops). I really didn’t expect to hit that issue at all converting from VMware Server to ESXi… Not a huge deal, just caught me by surprise.

First impressions? I should have done this years ago! I’m not the only one at the office that noticed how much faster the VMs are performing. Granted, the new hardware is definitely an upgrade, but now I’m curious if installing ESXi on that older server would’ve shown some improvements…

I see that update 1 was released yesterday. My timing was one day off.

• VMware ESXi Goes Free — Hmmm… (3)
• VMware Server FTW! (0)
• VMware Server 2 on Windows 2008 Server Core? (2)
• VMware Upgrade Policy Disappoints (3)

Run IE6, IE7, and IE8 on the Same Machine Using Windows 7 XP Mode

Clever article and worth a read.

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• Sysinternals Disk2vhd Announced (0)
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Nocs

Aside from the “in the cloud” aspect, think Windows Notepad. And all the formatting options that Notepad offers…

Tip: Don’t select a bunch of text and hit ctrl-I to italicize it – it’ll just disappear! Oh, and don’t hit ctrl-Z to undo that gaffe – nothing will happen. Just close the doc and re-open it instead.

From Nocs you can browse and open any document in your Google Docs account. This is a great feature but because of the formatting limitations don’t open a fully formatted document – or one with images – in Nocs and make changes. All the formatting – and images – will disappear.

Limitations aside though, this is a nifty little note taking application. Each note is a doc. Since the docs are hosted on Google Docs you can do some cool stuff with sharing docs or folders. Cool way to to have access to all of your notes and integrate them with a team.

For the future it’d be nice to see some more full featured formatting options. It would also be nice if Nocs created documents in a specified Google Documents folder.

If you’re looking for a Windows note taking app that lets you also access those notes from the web you might give this one a look. Lightweight, fast loading and easy to use are all big pluses.

• The Power of Together (1)
• More on Remote Desktop: Royal TS (5)
• Zoho Docs: The Glue (1)
• Wrestling with WSUS Bandwidth (0)

The good news is that most of the migrated sites worked right off the bat. The key word being “most.” In one of the apps we have some code that’s a bit out of the norm – deeply recursive with lots of SQL Server database IO. Every time we’d hit that code we would get an error after over a minute. And every error was on a different line of code:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][DBNETLIB]SQL Server does not exist or access denied.

Now, we know the database server didn’t suddenly go away because it had to exist to even get to this point.

After confirming that this stuff still works on the old Win2K server (against the same database server) we started poking around the code. No recent changes there and after way too many hours we took a break last night to mull it over some more.

This morning I decided that it might be interesting to install the SQL Server native drivers instead of using the ones that are bundled with Win2K3 (remember ODBC?). I installed the drivers, rebuilt the ODBC DSNs and tried again.

Still get an error, but now it is a little different:

[Microsoft][SQL Server Native Client 10.0]Named Pipes Provider: Could not open a connection to SQL Server [1326].

Funny, but that error was caused by the new drivers. I had to change the connection string to force TCP/IP instead of named pipes (the DB server is on a different subnet behind a firewall).

OK, back on TCP/IP connections we get yet another new error:

[Microsoft][SQL Server Native Client 10.0]TCP Provider: Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted.

Oh, but wait – we have a new little twist. On a whim, my testing partner hit refresh on that error page and it reloaded and completed without error.

Clearly we have an environmental issue, not a coding issue (we can debate if deeply recursive ASP is an issue another day!)

After a bit of searching I turned up an interesting blog post titled, “Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted.” It starts with a nice summary of why I’m getting these errors:

Here is the scoop
1. When you make authenticated calls, the client is closing connections. And when you are making authenticated calls repeatedly to the same server, you are making and closing connections repeatedly
2. The same might happen when you are making regular http [un authenticated] calls but setting keep-alive = false.

When a connection is closed, on the side that is closing the connection the 5 tuple { Protocol, Local IP, Local Port, Remote IP, Remote Port} goes into a TIME_WAIT state for 240 seconds by default.
In this case, the protocol is fixed – TCP. [T]he local IP, remote IP and remote PORT are also typically fixed. So the variable is the local port. What happens is that when you don’t bind a port in the range 1024-5000 is used. So roughly you have 4000 ports. If you use all of them in 4 minutes – meaning roughly you make 16 web service calls per second for 4 minutes you will exhaust all the ports. That is the cause of this exception.

The article continues with a solution based on a couple registry modifications:

1. One of the ways is to increase the dynamic port range. The max by default is 5000. You can set this up to 65534.
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\MaxUserPort is the key to use.

2. The second thing you can do is once the connection does get into an TIME_WAIT state you can reduce the time it is in that state, Default is 4 monutes, but you can set this to 30 seconds
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\TCPTimedWaitDelay is the key to use.
Set this to 30 seconds

Neither of those keys existed for me so I created both (as DWORD type). I used 32768 for the first one and 30 for the second. Rebooted the box and stuff started working!

As we add load to this machine I’ll likely have to revisit both parameters – and probably the code itself to try and streamline things a bit. I’m pretty sure I’m going to knock that 30 seconds parm down to closer to 10. But for now I’m happy. I have a server ready to take on the load and everything works.

• Lost Afternoon (1)
• Yesterday’s Education (3)
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• Windows Error Event ID: 1054 (Solved) (1)

Fortunately (for me!) I decided to play around the feature a bit this morning. Right away, my first thought was that it would be cool to exclude a list from my main feed.

For instance, let me group up all the SQL server gurus that I follow but not show them in my main list (They’ve all been at PASS this week and the tweet-volume was a bit much!). I logged the suggestion and was dismayed to see it was almost immediately closed – as “Solved.”

Clearly, a hint that I’m missing something obvious…

About 2 minutes later I was looking at someone’s twitter profile and realized I could add them to a list – without having to Follow them first.

Suddenly I became a big fan of Twitter lists! (and if this was painfully obvious to you from the beginning just have pity on me for being a bit slow on this one…)

I’ll admit there have been a lot of people that I considered following on twitter but just didn’t want to see them in my main twitter view. Maybe they post a little too much or a little too “inappropriately” (for over the shoulder views) or even too specialized. Now I can just add them to a list but not directly follow them. I can just periodically check on my lists to see what’s going on.

Frankly, I bet this is going to drop overall “Follow” counts system-wide…

Now, when will all the Twitter clients start offering support to view our lists?

[You can find me on Twitter as Chris_Kasten. Follow or add me to a list!]

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What do I know it does for sure? Boot from the Kon-Boot CD and you can completely ignore Windows passwords – or get root on Linux.

Kon-Boot is an prototype piece of software which allows to change contents of a linux kernel (and now Windows kernel also!!!) on the fly (while booting). In the current compilation state it allows to log into a linux system as ‘root’ user without typing the correct password or to elevate privileges from current user to root. For Windows systems it allows to enter any password protected profile without any knowledge of the password.

I’ve cautiously tested it on a Windows XP machine and it definitely seems to work as advertised. The machine I used is an XP box in our corporate domain and, most importantly, disconnected from the network at the time. (That machine is also slated for a wipe and reload before anything else is done with it!)

I’d love to test it more with those domain credentials by putting it on the network first, but I guess that would be kind of like inviting the folks from Nitro Circus to do all my server admin work…

I popped in the CD, booted from it, admired the old school BBS style ANSI graphics and then it started up Windows as normal.

At the Windows user/pass prompt I entered “administrator” and selected our domain. Leaving the password blank I smacked Enter and… holy crap, I was logged in!

Pulled the CD, rebooted and had to provide the original password to log in.

Kon-Boot doesn’t remove the password nor does it change it. This is incredibly helpful when you need to do a spot of maintenance on someone’s machine and they’re not around. No more changing their domain password on ‘em.

But can we trust it?

I spent an hour or so this evening searching around, didn’t really find anything definitive. Plenty of folks claiming safe/not-safe, but not much for details. A fellow in this hacker-news topic gave about the most details I found – all in 3 or 4 sentences…

Anyone else using it or have more information?

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A quick web search set off some warning bells and I suggested she just turn off the PC and drop it off so that I might take a closer look.

I powered it up this morning. First thing that greeted me was this:

Sure looks like the Windows Security Center, doesn’t it? Yet it is the “Cyber Protection Center” instead. Not a good sign! The Norton AV was there and running but disabled (and still long expired).

I looked around a bit and turned up a nice little Cyber Security Removal Guide over at bleepingcomputer.com. I followed the guide and it seems to have done the job — Malwarebyte’s Anti Malware provides the heavy lifting. I’ve had a lot of good luck with that app this year.

Once it seemed clean I booted into safe mode and ran a few more scans with a few more utilities just to be sure. I think we’re good.

I next removed the old Norton and installed Microsoft’s Security Essentials and boxed it all back up. Hopefully she can get a few more months out of this trusty old Celeron laptop.

Obligatory Disclaimer: you want to keep in mind that there’s never a 100% guarantee on complete malware removal – there can be too many variants. If you have the time – and all the original OS and app media – backing up the user data and then formatting and reloading clean is always a better option.

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