Day 1
Well today starts day two of this venture. I opened the client again and was prompted that this is an eval version and that I have 30 days left. This confused me a bit since when I registered on the website I got the impression that this was their free application which would make one assume that this was no evaluation. Also, I received a license key for the software but cannot find anywhere in the client to enter the key. I am not done with the install guide so maybe that part is somewhere down the line though I think that this is the first annoying encounter with the client application.
Now on to contiue the setup. I found the next annoying thing with the client and that is that the setup guide has instructions that either do not fit with this version or something was missed since I do not have any options in my "basic tasks" section of the "getting started" tab in the application. In order to download some appliances I had to go to the menu option file->va marketplace and then click on the link for Virtual Appliances. A round about way of getting what I wanted though a pain all together.
An interesting thing just happened. I have been browsing through what is in the client, and I am not sure what I did but now the options that I mentioned before in the "basic tasks" are now available. I am not sure what I did to make them available but they are there now.
I was able to download an appliance and upload the files though it seems that the wizard does not work with the free version of ESXi. You have to download the files onto your machine and then go to the "summary" tab in vSphere Client, right click on the data store that you want the files on and select "Browse Datastore", click the icon on the toolbar to upload the files, and then browse to the files that you are interested it. Not too difficult though the process could have been conceived better.
Now that I had done that it was time to try to rebuild my dead server from the last backup that I ran. This posed to be a bit of a problem. The back up that I have is a BAK file on a usb external hard drive. I was able to create a new Windows appliance with all the drives that would be the same size as the physical server had, I was able to start it and using my windows 2003 server CD, and the auto recovery disk start the process of the recovery. The problem lies in that I cannot find a way to either connect this USB drive to the server to be recognized as a drive or to create an image of the drive and convert it to a virtual drive (vmdk file). Supposedly there is a utility that can help me though I cannot find it. I did a lot of digging around online and I am having trouble trying to find anything useful. There are a lot of command line utils that people have suggested though most seem to be on linux. I saw one posting that talked about mounting the drive using a command line util to the ESXi server though I could not figure out how to make that work. I need to stop playing with this today and take care of some other things so there will need to be a day 3 and maybe 4 or 5 of this process. Either that or scrapping VMWare to try out XenServer which I hear has a much easier admin interface to work with.
So long for today.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
Venturing into the world of Virtualization Day 1
Recently one of my servers at home died. It is a big pain when something that you rely on is suddenly gone. Well, I had two options; one to buy the parts I think I need to fix the server though do not really know if that will do the job, two purchase a different server.
Right now money is a little tight so I have been putting this decision off though things have been starting to get a little difficult in trying to access files that I need and having our desktop computers talk to each other and such. So I started looking around ebay and craig's list and I put together a list of potentials. Based upon features and I will admit company trust I purchased a slightly used HP DL145 G2 server. It has Two dual core opteron 2.2 ghz processors, 4 gb of memory and 1 tb of disk space. It only took 3 days for it to gether here. In fact it arrived this afternoon. Needless to say my I was a bit excited (I know I am a nerd).
Well, one of the decisions that I made when purchasing this server was that I would consolidate the two servers that I have (one working and the other not working) into one server using virtualization. I am a bit of a novice when it comes to this technology though we use it quite a bit at work. Since we use VMWare ESX as work I was leaning towards that solution though I hear XenServer is also very good (MS HyperVisor is still too new for me to want to deal with it). So after work today I downloaded ESXi 4, burned it to a disk and off I went.
After a couple of hours of frustration on why I could not get the thing working I started doing some research and playing around (I am not one to call it quites, I have to know why it was not working). Anyway, I came to find out that the server I bought is not on the hardware compatibility list for VMWare. If I had know that in the first place I probably would have selected a different server, though since I do not do my due dilligence I am stuck with either figuring out how to make it work or giving up and trying another solution.
As I mentioned before, I am not one for giving up. I came to find out that the reason why ESXi does not like this server is due to the SCSI/SATA card that the two drives are plugged into by default. For those not familiar with this model it has a small back plane in the middle of the server that has a riser card plugged into it that supports PCI-X cards. One of the two slots contains a SATA 300 TX4 card which has a cable that plugs into the SCSI port on the mother board. ESXi does not work with drives that are connected to the server via a port or the backplane (at least that is my understanding and it is accurate in the case of this server). At this point in time all that I had mentioned was just an assumption. I needed a way to test it out and see if there was a way around it. We in looking at the mother board I found that it has two SATA ports on the board that the drives can plug into and bypass the backplane all together. Now I am not that familiar with all the features and functionality of this server yes so I am not sure yet if this is a good idea or not though I needed to test out a theory. Needless to say my assumption turned out to be correct. As soon as I changed the ports for those drives everything was working fabulously. I was able to boot up to the instance and I must say that I was a little disapointed. The interface has a lot to be desired. Say what you want about Microsoft but its interfaces are pretty funcitonal even though there may be some performance or security issues.
After configuring the VERY few options on the server I then flipped over to my desktop and browsed to the server (actually I set up a DNS entry for the server first in AD so that I can use a URL instead of an IP address). I downloaded the vSphere Client application and installed it and it all went smoothly. I then opened the vSphere Host Update Utility 4 (might as well make sure that everything is up-to-date). I was informed that there were some patches available, I downloaded them and installed them as easy as can be. After all my initial issues it almost seems to easy. I keep expecting something to go wrong, though so far so good. After the patches were applied the utility rebooted the ESXi server and everything came back up without any issues. I am still feeling like there is some impending doom awaiting me, maybe it is just the cynical IT guy always expecting the worst.
Next I opened the vSphere client application, logged onto the server and no errors or issues. The interface is nice and clean. Not a lot of clutter on it which is something that I like. So far so good. Currently it is 11:30 pm in the evening and even though I want to stay up and be nerdy I need to get some sleep. I will begin my foray into the world of creating vertual machines on the VM Server Tomorrow.
Good Night.
Day 2
Right now money is a little tight so I have been putting this decision off though things have been starting to get a little difficult in trying to access files that I need and having our desktop computers talk to each other and such. So I started looking around ebay and craig's list and I put together a list of potentials. Based upon features and I will admit company trust I purchased a slightly used HP DL145 G2 server. It has Two dual core opteron 2.2 ghz processors, 4 gb of memory and 1 tb of disk space. It only took 3 days for it to gether here. In fact it arrived this afternoon. Needless to say my I was a bit excited (I know I am a nerd).
Well, one of the decisions that I made when purchasing this server was that I would consolidate the two servers that I have (one working and the other not working) into one server using virtualization. I am a bit of a novice when it comes to this technology though we use it quite a bit at work. Since we use VMWare ESX as work I was leaning towards that solution though I hear XenServer is also very good (MS HyperVisor is still too new for me to want to deal with it). So after work today I downloaded ESXi 4, burned it to a disk and off I went.
After a couple of hours of frustration on why I could not get the thing working I started doing some research and playing around (I am not one to call it quites, I have to know why it was not working). Anyway, I came to find out that the server I bought is not on the hardware compatibility list for VMWare. If I had know that in the first place I probably would have selected a different server, though since I do not do my due dilligence I am stuck with either figuring out how to make it work or giving up and trying another solution.
As I mentioned before, I am not one for giving up. I came to find out that the reason why ESXi does not like this server is due to the SCSI/SATA card that the two drives are plugged into by default. For those not familiar with this model it has a small back plane in the middle of the server that has a riser card plugged into it that supports PCI-X cards. One of the two slots contains a SATA 300 TX4 card which has a cable that plugs into the SCSI port on the mother board. ESXi does not work with drives that are connected to the server via a port or the backplane (at least that is my understanding and it is accurate in the case of this server). At this point in time all that I had mentioned was just an assumption. I needed a way to test it out and see if there was a way around it. We in looking at the mother board I found that it has two SATA ports on the board that the drives can plug into and bypass the backplane all together. Now I am not that familiar with all the features and functionality of this server yes so I am not sure yet if this is a good idea or not though I needed to test out a theory. Needless to say my assumption turned out to be correct. As soon as I changed the ports for those drives everything was working fabulously. I was able to boot up to the instance and I must say that I was a little disapointed. The interface has a lot to be desired. Say what you want about Microsoft but its interfaces are pretty funcitonal even though there may be some performance or security issues.
After configuring the VERY few options on the server I then flipped over to my desktop and browsed to the server (actually I set up a DNS entry for the server first in AD so that I can use a URL instead of an IP address). I downloaded the vSphere Client application and installed it and it all went smoothly. I then opened the vSphere Host Update Utility 4 (might as well make sure that everything is up-to-date). I was informed that there were some patches available, I downloaded them and installed them as easy as can be. After all my initial issues it almost seems to easy. I keep expecting something to go wrong, though so far so good. After the patches were applied the utility rebooted the ESXi server and everything came back up without any issues. I am still feeling like there is some impending doom awaiting me, maybe it is just the cynical IT guy always expecting the worst.
Next I opened the vSphere client application, logged onto the server and no errors or issues. The interface is nice and clean. Not a lot of clutter on it which is something that I like. So far so good. Currently it is 11:30 pm in the evening and even though I want to stay up and be nerdy I need to get some sleep. I will begin my foray into the world of creating vertual machines on the VM Server Tomorrow.
Good Night.
Day 2
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