When we need to convert physical systems to virtual ones, we often use PlateSpin to do these conversions. PlateSpin works quite well. In principle, you just need to do some "drag and drop" to P2V a server.

This week, the need arose to P2V my laptop. My laptop normally has 1GB of memory and runs Windows XP. Because of a motherboard failure, I got a replacement laptop with only 512MB. And of course, this happened before I needed to travel abroad so no time to add additional ram. I normally run Sharepoint in a virtual machine for some simple development projects. With only 512MB of ram, that was a no-go. So I decided to take an image of my Windows XP installation and I installed Windows Server 2003 with SQL 2000, Sharepoint Portal Server, Visual Studio 2003 and so on. Works ok with only 512MB or ram.

Now (a few weeks later), I want to put Windows XP back on my laptop (with 1GB) and run my Windows Server 2003 installation as a virtual machine.

I decided to use VMware P2V Assistant to do the conversion and the process went as follows:

• Installed the P2V Assistant (Windows application) on my desktop pc.
• Connected both my desktop and laptop using wired Ethernet.
• Booted my laptop with the P2V boot cd. This boot cd is a Knoppix live cd. Knoppix recognizes a lot of hardware. It needed to recognize the disk(s) on my laptop (IDE) and also the network card. Wired ethernet is required because the wireless network card is not recognized and would be too slow anyway.
• After booting the laptop with Knoppix, went through the P2V "server" wizard that found my hard disk(s) and network card.
• Switched to the P2V Assistant on my desktop and told it to connect to the P2V server on the laptop (using its IP address). The connection is done on TCP port 7000.
• The P2V Assistant is an easy wizard and all the steps are self explanatory. I had the option to clone my laptop's hard disk directly to another disk or to a vmdk file. I chose the latter.
• After the cloning process finished, I ended up with a vmdk file on my desktop. That vmdk file is the clone of my laptop's disk. The P2V Assistant only copies actual data from the source disk. So although the source disk was 50GB in size, the cloned disk (vmdk) was only 11GB.
• Now I could tell the P2V Assistant to perform system reconfiguration. Without that, the system will not be bootable. You only need to perform hardware reconfiguration for boot disks, not for data disks.
• I also specified VMware Workstation as the target. I will run my P2Vd laptop (Windows 2003) as a virtual machine on the same laptop but with VMware Workstation 5.5 on Windows XP.

That was it. Everything went very smoothly and easily. Attached to this post is a procedure with screenshots that goes over the whole process.

Quest has a free tool to report on your Sharepoint configuration. It provides a Sharepoint Server summary and detail report and displays information about database sizes, users, site collections and more.

The tool's datasheet is here.

virtualization.info reports that Microsoft might release Virtual Server 2005 R2 for free. Not surprizing, considering that VMWare is giving VMWare Server away for free as well. And besides, 99$ or 199$ for Virtual Server 2005 R2 meant it was virtually free already. No pun intended.

Monad is a new shell that can be used in Exchange 12 for command line management. Very powerful stuff, check it out. Get the docs as well.

Check out what you can do with Monad for Exchange 12 here.

Want to know more about Exchange 12? Then check out the webcast series here. Not too technically detailed but good for having an overview.

There are many other webcasts about Exchange there, enough to fill a few empty hours.

The purpose of this article is to describe some of the features of ESX 3.0 and VirtualCenter 2.0. Some basic knowledge of ESX 2.x and VirtualCenter 1.x is required to fully understand all topics described below. It is important to know that ESX 3.0 can be used on its own, without VirtualCenter. However, this is rarely done in reality. Most if not all enterprise customers use ESX in combination with VirtualCenter. VirtualCenter adds a management layer as well as extra features to ESX implementations.   more »

Today, I did the VCP (VMWare Certified Professional) test and passed. The exam is not too hard to pass but the wording of the questions could be a bit better. I am quite fluent in English (although I make many mistakes, just read my posts on this blog ) but as a non-native speaker it is not so easy.

I studied quite a lot for this test using the following materials:

• The official VMWare training material
• The ESX Administration Guide
• VMWare ESX Server Advanced Technical Design Guide: get it, it's great
• B2V Command Line Guide: comprehensive
• All the resources at http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/: great stuff, all of it

Of course, hands-on experience is required to have a better feel for all the stuff you read. Even though you work with a product all the time, an exam always has questions about stuff you never actually use. So it's a good idea to practice that.

One note about practice exams. The practice exam from http://www.testking.com is almost identical to the real thing. We acquired the practice exam yesterday to validate our knowledge. It was our understanding that the questions in these exams were sample questions but me and my colleague (who also did the test) were surprized to learn that they actually are the real thing (with some errors though). This is too bad because it can (will) lead to paper-based VCPs which devalues the certification.

 

Interesting article that reports about VMWare GSX never being meant to be used in production. However, I do not think this is an official statement from VMWare.

GSX (or VMWare Server) is perfectly suited for running production servers. It all depends on the workload and the specific needs of the customer.

VMWare has published a whitepaper about LUN security in ESX. This is mainly in response to an article about potential security issues with ESX in a SAN environment. That article was quickly dismissed by people with knowledge about ESX.

ESX presents virtual SCSI devices to virtual machines. The virtual machines only see that virtual device. Even with raw device mappings, the virtual machine only sees the LUN that is assigned to it and cannot do anything else like scan for other LUNs on the SAN etc...

The whitepaper from VMWare also talks a little bit about N-Port ID virtualization (NPIV) which will provide a WWN-to-VM mapping. This allows storage admins to configure visibility of a SAN LUN to a virtual machine with their native toolset. Even with NPIV, virtual machines will only see the LUN that is assigned.

It seems that Unisys is expanding the relationship with VMWare so that ESX 3.0 can be run on these systems. Currently, the ES7000 cannot run ESX. Naturally, GSX is supported.

Not a lot of technical information can be found yet but more info in this article.

While talking with people about virtualization, I have noticed that many think they can just install ESX on any available server and use all of that server’s resources. This article discusses two of the most common misconceptions I have encountered:

“We will install ESX on an HP superdome!”

VMware products (including ESX 2.x and 3.0) run on x86 architecture only, not on Itanium. HP superdomes use Itanium processors. ESX is meant to virtualize x86 operating systems such as NT 4, Windows 2000/2003, Linux, etc… Doing this on Itanium would probably mean big performance hits.

Note that is is possible to run x64 operating systems such as Windows Server 2003 x64 on ESX 3.0 (experimental support). But in order to do that, you need to install ESX 3 on an x64 capable host. On Intel, VT support is needed as well.

“We will install ESX on a system with 32 CPUs and use them all!”

Some customers want a scale up solution with big boxes running many virtual machines. There are some x86–based systems such as the IBM x460 that support 32 Xeon CPUs. The x460 is actually a four-way capable server but it is expandable by adding additional nodes. The additional nodes can be other x460 systems or the MXE-460 modular expansion enclosure. It is possible to build a physical server with 32 CPUs, 512GB of RAM and 48 PCI-X slots. Take into account that these 32 CPUs can be dual-core with hyper-threading support which means 128 logical CPUs.

Clearly, such a system is beyond the capabilities of ESX. ESX 2.x supports 16 logical CPUs. This means that with the x460, you can build a 16–way system with single-core CPUs and hyper-threading turned off, or an 8–way system with dual-core CPUs and hyper-threading turned off. ESX 2.x also supports a maximum of 80 virtual CPUs. This means you can add a maximum of 80 single CPU virtual machines, or 40 dual CPU, or a mix.

ESX 3.0 increases the number of supported logical CPUs to 32. Taking the x460 as an example, you will be able to go up to 8 nodes with 32 single-core CPUs with hyper-threading turned off. Or you could use 8 dual-core CPUs with hyper-threading turned on (2 nodes). Of course, the 32 single-core CPUs would have better performance.

While I was catching up on reading the excellent virtualization.info site, I came across a post about Digi’s AnywhereUSB product. Looks like a great way to connect USB devices to virtual machines. Check out the details in the whitepaper.