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.
No comments:
Post a Comment