As previously discussed, we recently purchased an MD3000i iSCSI SAN from Dell. We are running the “free” VSphere ESXi 4 on 3 hosts. That’s right, no VCenter, no VCB, no VMotion, no SVM. So, how does one best approach moving these VM guests from local storage to our new lovely SAN? Well, we looked into the following possibilities: Read the rest of this entry »
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Well, the time finally came. We bit the bullet and purchased a new Dell PowerEdge R710 and an MD3000i SAN for the office. The R710 will be a new VSphere ESXi 4 host that will take on a bulk of the production VM’s while one of the remaining 2950’s will remain a smaller production host and the third 2950 will be a test and development box.
So you can see the MD3000i with the faceplate off directly below the new R710. I’m tempted to leave the faceplate off so that the executives and visitors see more lights when they look in. For some reason, non-technical people tend to have a first reaction to hardware such that more lights is mo’ better. 
Read the rest of this entry »
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As previously posted, we have embarked on a project that includes the upgrade and consolidation of SQL Server machines from version 2000 and 2005 to a single server running SQL Server 2008. We have been performing testing to find the optimal path for performing these tasks.
This series of articles present our findings and processes as we performed them. These processes may not be optimal nor preferred in other installations, but they represent the best case for our particular assignment. As such, we certainly welcome feedback.
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Okay, I’m really thanking the good Lord right now. He granted us discernment that kept us from losing an entire day’s worth of data for my employer. To Him be all the glory.
So here is the scenario. I am removing an old VMWare snapshot through the VI Client on a large file and print server. Of course, it is a Virtual server running Windows Server 2003. The Snapshot removal was being done in preparation of taking a new snapshot prior to extending on of the virtual drives on this virtual server. The Snapshot delete gets to 95% and hangs. After 45 minutes I restart the management agents on the ESXi server per a number of similar posts.
Upon reconnecting to the server via the VI client, I see suddenly that this server is now listed in the inventory as “Unknown (invalid)”. What? This can’t be happening! Can it?
The long and short of it is that I ended up created a new Virtual Machine and used the existing virtual disks (.vmdk files.) Started the new VM up and there it was. My server was back, or was it. A quick look at the event viewer told me the horrible news, there were events from the last few minutes and then nothing until about three months ago when we originally migrated the physical server to a virtual.
Oh my, the snapshots! I had the new VM pointed at the original parent disks not the latest snapshot files. I shut the server back down and say a quick prayer. I manually download and modify the .vmx definition to point to the various server-000003.vmdk files. (These were the last in the snapshot numbering scheme) Uploaded the VMX back and started the VM up.
No luck, I get an error message stating that there was a problem with the disks and the snapshot, “parent virtual disk has been modified”. Oh crud! I killed the snapshot linkages by starting the VM with the parent disks the first go round instead of the snapshots.
Thanks to my good friend Google, I quickly found my way to the Drive:Activated blog and this posting about the disk file linkage issue.
This boils down to ensuring that the you properly chain the parentCID in the largest numbered .vmdk disk file to the CID of the next largest numbered .vmdk file. Continue this until you get to the root .vmdk. (It is the one that doesn’t have the -00000x numbering after the disk name.
Since we are running on ESXi I needed a way to read and write the .vmdk files. There are a couple of ways to do it.
1. Use the VI Client Storage browser, download the .vmdk files, edit them and then upload them.
2. Use shell utilities to do the same directly on the ESXi server.
ESXi is missing some things from its big brother, namely a console. Thanks to numerous posts including this one, I entered the unsupported ESXi console.
From here, I navigated to the storage area and followed the concepts in the Drive:Activated article. Specifically I first used the grep command to quickly ascertain the various CID values for each vmdk file in each virtual drive series.
> grep CID= SERVER.vmdk
> grep CID= SERVER-000001.vmdk
> grep CID= SERVER-000002.vmdk
> grep CID= SERVER-000003.vmdk
You get the idea. I had a number of virtual drives in this server so I made myself a table to keep track of the CID and ParentCID.
As you can see above, the SERVER and SERVER2 disks had two parentCIDs that I needed to fix (RED). Best I can tell, the snapshot problem hung on the SERVER_1 disks as the 000001, 000002, 000003 disks all had the same CID. Kinda hard to link them together that way! By the grace of God, this was a small archive drive and I could restore it quickly from backups.
Finally I restarted the VM and after an anxious 10 minutes for ESXi to boot the server, the lovely Windows logon screen greeted me. I logged in and what do you know, we were good to go.
The good news is, the server is back up and running. Everything was either good to go or was restored from backups (4GB of files out of over 500GB).
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Funny enough, I got an email from VMWare inviting us to participate in the VMWare Server 2.0 Beta.
This was great news to me that they are continuing to do development on
the free VMWare Server product. I really expected them to push more of
us to VM Infrastructure lines. Looks like there is an early 2008
release goal to production of 2.0.
Kudos to VMWare for this as
it is a great way to help folks like my organization to get started
with virtualization at low cost (free) for the Software and as we grow
we can grow in to the additional features of VM Infrastructure.
Straight from the site, some of the new features include:
Exciting stuff….
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Whew, have things been busy. But how great it is to be busy doing God’s work!
Well, working with a non-profit, we are always looking for ways to effectively use
the resources were are given. Those resources come as assets,
partnerships, financial investments and personnel. Since we want to
make the best use of the resources, we get the opportunity to look at
things from a different persective. Now that does not always mean
finding free or "cheap", despite what anyone thinks. When it comes to
technology, nothing, I repeat, nothing is free!
So, one of the
projects we are working on involves making a decision for the
organization on a reporting and eventually, an ETL platform.(More on
the details of that project in another post) As such, we really are
going to need to have another server for development/testing and for
production use. Interestingly, one of the existing servers, a Dell
Poweredge 6600, has room for another processor and lots more memory.
Hmmmm….that got us thinking. What about virtualization.
Now, I
have used virtualization technology in test environments a bit over the
last few years but have not kept up with developments in the
marketplace. Well, I was certainly pleased with what I found.
I
spent the last 9 years in a Microsoft shop and that was after a
VAX/VMS, HP-UX, AIX shop. So, I am not the biggest fan of the Microsoft
Server platform but also not a big opponent either. I think the
different O/Ses have their places. However, I can’t help but go back to
a Unix or Linux base as a workhorse. I was pleased as punch to learn
that the VMWare Server is now offered as a free virtualization platform.
So, I’ll spare you the gory details on not using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005
and move on to where we are at. Being a small IT shop, we don’t have a
data center chock full of servers that would need to be centrally
managed so the free VMWare Server product is fine. If you need this
kind of data center management for virtual environments, take a look at
the not-so-free Virtualization management platform from VMWare.
As part of my testing, er… playing, I loaded VMware Server on my Dell D520 Laptop
with 1GB RAM. My base O/S on the laptop is usually Windows XP Pro SP 2.
Install was a snap of the server. I quickly created a new virtual
machine for a test Windows XP Pro SP2 machine since I am constantly
messing my base O/S up by loading and testing lots of software. After
the first reboot of the VM, I logged into the machine and installed the
VMWare Tools. This is an important steps as it significantly improves
display and mouse performance as well as other under the hood
improvements. (Don’t forget this step.)
I typically use a bridged
network setup as it allows the VM direct network access via the host’s
NIC. Quick, easy and maintainable. Really, everything works the same in
the VM. The only quickly noticed difference is that instead of the
three finger salute to login (Ctl-Alt-Del) you use Ctl-Alt-Ins. Now, I
wanted to have a way to always get back to this clean install of the VM
operating system for new tests. That is where the snapshot feature
shines.
First thing to remember is that before you take the
snapshot of the guest O/S, you MUST defragment the guest O/S virtual
drive. You can do this either with the defrag tools in the guest O/S or
from the VMWare Server console. You do this by shutting down the guest
O/S. Then edit the VM setting and choose the Defragment option under
the hard disk options.
Once done with the defragmentation, take your
snapshot. This snapshot can be used to move the VM back to the exact
state it was in at the time of the snapshot. According to the
documentation, if you take the snapshot without defragmenting the
virtual disk first, you lose the ability to effectively defragment the
virtual drive. Keep in mind that the virtual disk is actually just a
file or files on the host operating system. Therefore, you will also
want to ensure the host operating system keeps it’s physical drives
free from excessive fragmentation.
Now, I certainly could not stop at Windows XP Pro. Hehe…. So, next on the list was a virtual Ubuntu Server 6.06 LTS and an installation of Ubuntu Ultimate.
Again, no problems. Worked like a champ. By the way, I loaded the
Ubuntu Ultimate by telling the virtual machine definition that the
virtual CD-Rom drive should actually point to and .ISO image. Again,
worked a treat.
Fair enough, but since Windows operating system can
be a bit tempermental and subject to security issues, what about using
a Linux operating system as the host to then run the Windows servers as
virtual machines. So, that’s what we tried. We loaded Ubuntu Server
6.06 LTS onto an older Dell desktop. So, we had a nice Linux server
running which we quickly loaded the VMWare Server onto. I chose not to
install web base MUI and instead to use the existing VMWare Server
Console on my laptop to remotely connect and manage the VMWare Server
on the Ubuntu server.
Sure enough, I slapped a Windows 2003
Server R2 installation CD into the drive on the Ubuntu server and went
back to my office. I fired up the VMWare Server console and create the
VM definition. Then I booted the VM and the CD-ROM on the Ubuntu server
came to life runing the Windows 2003 Server setup. Less than an hour
later, I have a fully functioning Windows server running as a VM on a
machine with Ubuntu server as the host operating system. Sweeeeet!
Now
I am testing the Linux client for Reptrospect which is what we use for
backups. I need to get comfortable with disaster recovery functionality
for the host and most importantly, the VM’s. One of the nice things
about the VM’s is that if I have all the files for each VM, I can move
then to another server, even with a different host O/S and start them
up. They’ll keep chuggin along. Nice!
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