vSpecialist

VMware Press Sweepstakes

Michael — Sun, 13 May 2012 16:30:05 +0000

VMware Press, VMware’s official publishing arm, are in the middle of running a 60 day competition sweepstake (that ends June 30th 2012). On offer are a $100 Amazon gift card and three VMware Press books for the winner and nine second prize winners will win an eBook of their choice.

Enter here.

The publisher has already produced two excellent books in Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0 and Automating vSphere with VMware vCenter Orchestrator. This summer promises a glut of new titles that I’d be interested to read too:

Storage Implementation in VMware vSphere 5.0 (July 2012)
Managing and Optimizing vSphere Deployments (July 2012)
The Official VCP5 Certification Guide (July 2012)
VMware View 5: Building a Successful Virtual Desktop (August 2012)
VMware vSphere 5 Integration into the Datacenter (August 2012)

As and when they come out you can probably expect me to post a review here.

Installing SQL 2008 R2 on 2008 R2 Server Core

Michael — Sat, 12 May 2012 09:43:17 +0000

Following on from previous posts on a similar theme, I wanted to make a quick note of how SQL 2008 R2 is installed on a 2008 R2 Server Core VM.

SQL 2008 R2 has a number of feature dependencies that must be present before an installation can take place. Assuming that you’ve deployed your VM, given it some network settings and joined it to your domain (if you want) then there are three further things you need to address to get SQL installed.

The first is adding some disk space to the VM. If, like me, you deploy Windows server VMs with a reasonable 40Gb of C: drive space you’ll need to add something to have enough room for SQL and some databases. I like to keep databases and log files on separate drives to the main OS so I tend to add extra disks to the VM. I’ve covered that off in a previous post.

Next up – those pesky dependencies. You could do this remotely with Server Manager running on another machine somewhere or you could just use the command line. Hint: if you’ve got the commands written down somewhere then the command line is so much quicker. Just RDP to your 2008 R2 Server Core VM and paste the following into the command prompt:

dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFx2-ServerCore
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFx3-ServerCore
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFx2-ServerCore-WOW64
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFx3-ServerCore-WOW64
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:IIS-WebServerRole
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:IIS-ISAPIFilter
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:IIS-ISAPIExtensions
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:IIS-NetFxExtensibility
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:IIS-ASPNET

The final stage is installing SQL itself. Simply mount the DVD ISO and run setup! Note though that I think SQL 2008 may not be supported on Server 2008 Core versions. SQL 2012 seems to be but I haven’t played with that yet.

Adding disks to 2008 R2 Server Core VMs

Michael — Mon, 07 May 2012 08:14:32 +0000

In a lab environment, sometimes anything can go. Solutions aren’t always standards compliant or don’t always follow best / sensible practices. One that I can’t shake off though is using separate drives in my VMs for operating systems and data. It’s too ingrained.

Given my new found penchant for using Windows 2008 R2 Server Core for VMs in my lab though I hit a little niggle that I thought I ought to note down for when I inevitably forget about it.

When deploying a VM from a template for a specific purpose, it’s natural to add extra disks to it. In the normal version of windows, using the DiskManagement snapin to bring the disk online automatically makes it read-write as well. In Server Core, you can’t use the snapin locally. Firewalls permitting, you should be able to use it remotely (via RSAT tools installed on another machine) but if you’re in a hurry and comfortable with DISKPART then you might be tempted to use that. And that’s where the niggle is.

In DISKPART when you online a new disk, it changes the disk’s state but not whether it is read-only or read-write. And you can’t create a partition on a readonly disk!

So, what do you do? It’s just a couple of extra steps really.

1. In the command prompt window on the VM’s console, start up DISKPART.

2. First, list the disks present on the VM:

You notice that Disk 1 is 100% free but Offline.

3. Next we select that disk and then turn it Online.

If you tried to create a partition now you’d get a fairly non-specific error.

4. Look at the disk’s detail and you see why though.

“Current Read-only State: Yes”, not the clearest way of saying it but the disk is read-only at present.

5. To make the disk writable you need only type ATTRIBUTE DISK CLEAR READONLY.

Now you can create a partition as you normally would.

Job done.

Installing VMtools on Windows 2008 Server Core

Michael — Sun, 06 May 2012 12:11:01 +0000

Not having a full GUI to use, it can sometimes be difficult to install software on Windows 2008 Server Core machines. You need to get used to scripted installations, software distribution methods and / or silent installs.

If you’ve gone as far as initiating the tools installation for a VM you could be forgiven for wondering what the heck you’re going to do next. The install doesn’t autorun (Windows Explorer does this normally but Windows Explorer isn’t there). Even if you run setup64.exe manually it won’t help.

If you run setup64.exe /? though you get a little bit of help.

A typical (and silent) install of VMtools can therefore be performed by running:

setup64.exe /s /v /qn

The VM will automatically reboot though, just so you know…

Note: Jonathan Medd has a very similar (and excellent) post about installing VMtools on Windows Server 8 Beta.

Review: Trainsignal VMware vSphere 5 Training

Michael — Sat, 05 May 2012 10:38:27 +0000

I’ve been a big fan of Trainsignal’s courses for some time now. You never forget your first one and for me that was “VMware vSphere Pro Series Training Vol1″.

Time has flown by though. Trainsignal have since released a number of new courses, several of them VMware focused. I have some of them in my library and there are also some that I couldn’t justify purchasing at the time.

With all of the changes in vSphere 5 I thought it a good idea to get hold of Trainsignal’s latest and greatest as part of my VCP5 preparations. I’ve done a fair bit of work with vSphere 5 but there were always going to be bits that I was less familiar with. What the training offers is the opportunity to bone up on those weaker areas and brush up on the bits that you’re more familiar with already courtesy of two knowledgable and well-informed virtualisation experts: David Davis and Elias Khnaser.

The training comes on 3 DVDs containing a series of screencast videos covering all of the content but there’s also the ability to watch the videos online if you want. At its simplest you can just pop one of the DVDs into your laptop and get started or there are iPod optimised copies also available for importing into iTunes. Pulling your iPhone out of your pocket on the tube in London and learning about VMware Data Recovery is almost priceless as the time would be otherwise wasted.

As a VCP5 resource it’s not everything that you need. Don’t forget that:

You need to have attended a VMware course to qualify for the VCP5 (or hold a VCP4 already)
There’s no substitute for practical experience

That said, it’s an excellent place to start building or refresh your knowledge and I’d totally recommend the course to almost anyone with an interest in vSphere 5. It’s not without its flaws, I spotted one or two typos and sometimes a iPhone isn’t the best device on which to see large and detailed captures of the vSphere Client! Also, there were some very minor inconsistencies between different videos but these were when opinions were being offered and were not related to factual content. Not something that concerned me, I just picked it up.

Overall an excellent resource. Hats off to Elias, David and the Trainsignal team.

Windows 2008 – Full Fat or Diet?

Michael — Fri, 04 May 2012 07:41:30 +0000

Out of curiosity (cats give it a bad name in my opinion) I recently chose to do a little experimentation. No bunsen burners and weird coloured liquids though, I wanted to do a light weight comparison of Windows Server 2008 R2 vs Windows Server Core 2008 R2 in my home lab. Let it never be said that I don’t know how to have fun!

It was a rather simple comparison with a fairly simple aim: I wanted to know if there was a difference in how many resources were consumed on an ESXi host (specifically one of my low power HP Microservers). Certainly not rocket science.

I started off by building brand new VMs for each in vSphere 5. Aside from the OS itself, both were identically configured with:

1 vCPU
2Gb Ram
1 x 40Gb, thin provisioned VMDK hosted on an NFS datastore

I installed VMtools into both, enabled RDP in both and gave them IP addresses. That was it. No updates, no added features etc.

I powered them up on separate, otherwise empty hosts within a few seconds of each other and then sat back to watch.

After each had about 5 minutes to settle down, the above snapshot from vCenter showed:

2008 R2 Server Core base install uses nearly 4Gb less disk space
2008 R2 Server Core is uses less host memory (about 81Mb at the time of the screenshot)
2008 R2 Server Core uses fractionally more CPU (13Mhz)

Of course this was without any applications or additional services running and so the results may be different when the two are used in anger but vanilla installs seemed like the simplest way to compare them.

Server Core seems to use less physical memory and have a smaller disk footprint. Those, in my home lab, are probably amongst the biggest constraints that I have to deal with so in future I’m going to try and make more use of Server Core VMs. As long as the differences in how they’re managed doesn’t inconvenience me too much that is.

London VMUG 17th May 2012

Michael — Thu, 03 May 2012 08:01:52 +0000

Hi, my name’s Michael and I’m a geek. It’s been 3 months since my last VMUG.

I had the weirdest dream the other night in which I stood up and uttered those words in front of all of the attendees at this month’s London VMUG. The truth is, I probably am suffering from VMUG withdrawal. Lucky me, it’s just two weeks until the next one.

Thursday 17th May is the date, the location is the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry as usual and of course there will be vBeers afterwards. The question is not “Will you be there?”, it’s “Why wouldn’t you be there?”. Just check out the agenda highlights:

Using vShield to Drive Efficiency and Costs Savings – Stephen Porter, Trend Micro
Desktop Transformation with Liquidware Labs – Dan Falconer, Liquidware Labs
Solving VM Storage Cost and Performance Challenges with VM-aware Storage - Tintri
VMTurbo Labs
The vCenter Appliance – Hugo Phan, VMware
Climb the Stack and Pimp your Cloud with VMware vFabric – Peter Holditch, VMware
Flexpod: The Flexible Converged Infrastructure – Chris Kranz
Help, My VDI Project is Hell! – Julian Wood
Management and Orch’n – What, Why & How – Steve Bryen
The vMarket – Skills in Demand for the Next Five Years – Neil Mills
Over to You: Design Me a Highly Available Virtualised Infrastructure – Darren Woollard
Writing VMware Apps for Novice Programmers – Ricky El-Qasem

It’s also a brilliant opportunity to network with all sorts of people – published authors, freelancers, consultants, end users and evangelists – all of whom have differing experiences to share. Best of all, it’s free to register and attend!

VMware Forum London 2012

Michael — Wed, 02 May 2012 07:35:23 +0000

This has crept up on us somehow. Where did April go?

VMware Forum London is on next Wednesday (9th May). I’ve not been to one before and this year doesn’t look like being the year either as I’ll be in sunny California.

So what is it and why should you go? I’ve borrowed this directly from VMware’s site:

What is the VMware Forum?
At VMware Forum 2012, you will have the opportunity to learn how VMware, the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, together with our partners, is delivering cloud infrastructures to address critical issues such as how you can reduce IT complexity while improving security and accelerating how applications are built, deployed and run across the enterprise.

Who should attend?
VMware Forum is a one-day event aimed at application owners, infrastructure & operations teams, and desktop managers, where you will be given actionable advice on how to deliver an effective cloud strategy. Come join us at VMware Forum to help make the cloud work for you!

There should be plenty of VMware partners there to talk to as well including EMC, Symantec, vKernel, Xsigo and plenty of the other usual virtualisation suspects as well as plenty more that you won’t be so familiar with but should not underestimate. There will also be a competition to win VMworld Europe 2012 tickets.

No related posts.

Windows 7 Printer Sharing with a Mac

Michael — Tue, 01 May 2012 20:24:06 +0000

For quite some time I had my home printer connected to a USB port on one of my ESXi hosts. To save a bit of memory I doubled up my home lab’s AD domain controller as a print server. I did this because the only other non-virtual computer at home capable of printer sharing was running Windows 7 and for some reason I could not get my Mac to work properly with the printer when it was shared from that. (Authentication would fail when trying to connect to it via SMB.)

The downside of this arrangement though was that my AD VM was tied to that single ESXi host. I couldn’t vMotion it without losing the printing functionality – something that my wife quite rightly complained to me about on several occasions! Obviously I should probably just get a new wireless printer and solve the problem that way. Believe me it’s tempting but I so rarely print that it seems slightly wasteful whilst the old printer still works and I was also determined to make it work and bend it to my will.

Finally I did some digging and found a way to make it work. The printer is now shared from the Windows 7 desktop and usable by me and my Mac, my wife from her laptop and the children from the PC itself.

How? Like this…

On the PC:

1. Open The Control Panel.

2. Select “Programs and Features”.

3. Click the link to “Turn Windows Features on of off”.

4. Under “Print and Document Services” enable the “LPD Print Service”. Click “OK”.

5. Finally share your Windows printer as normal.

On the Mac:

1. Open System Preferences

2. Open “Print & Fax”.

3. Click the little “+” icon to add a new printer.

4. In the “Add Printer” dialog select the “Advanced” section.

Select “LPD/LPR Host or Printer” as the type.
In the “URL” field enter the URL in the format lpd://ipaddressorhostname/printersharename
Give the printer a suitable name.

5. Select a driver by selecting “Select Printer Software” from the “Print Using” dropdown (note that I have CUPS+Gutenprint drivers installed to give me a wider selection of drivers).

6. Finally “Add” your chosen printer.

It should be noted that this solution of course requires that the PC be on for printing to be possible. Most of the time the one that I am using is asleep or hibernated and I just give it a poke with a WOL packet generated from a local webpage when I need to print. It’s not like I do a lot of printing anyway.

Idera PowerCLI session 25/04/2012

Michael — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 20:27:41 +0000

On Wednesday 25th April scripting genius Luc Dekens will be running an online session demonstrating how to automate the creation and configuration (including guest OS) of VMs. If you want to learn more about PowerCLI / PowerShell or you need to hone your existing skills it’d be well worth registering.