Anything about IT

Ruben Spruijt has published an updated whitepaper “VDI Smackdown” which provides you with an overview of today’s VDI solutions. More details here

Finally, after a long waiting time, VMware has released a release candidate for VMware Workstation 7.

• Aero support for Windows 7 and Vista Guests!
• Windows 7 support (as a Host and Guest OS)
• OpenGL and Shader Model 3.0 support for Windows guests
• Create guests with Multi-core or 4-way CPUs and up to 32GB of Memory
• Download VMware vSphere 4 and install ESX as a guest OS to try out the latest features.
• Dynamically Download the latest VMware Tools package only when you need it.
• Print from your VM without installing printer drivers. Virtual Printing courtesy of our friends at ThinPrint.
• Automatically create snapshots on scheduled intervals with AutoProtect.
• Secure your Virtual Machines with 256-bit encryption.
• Remote Replay Debugging and other advanced development features
• ALSA Sound support on Linux hosts enables multiple VMs to play "music" concurrently.
• Instantly pause a VM to free up system resources or dedicate horsepower to other running VMs.
• The Virtual Network Editor user interface has been redesigned for Windows users.

Download VMware Workstation Release Candidate – October 2009

Read VMware Workstation 7.0, VMware Player 3.0, and VMware ACE 2.6 Release Candidate Release Notes

In my earlier post “Detect XP Mode support” I wrote about a utility that checks the system for virtualization support. I have just found a similar one from VMWare that helps detecting if your CPU supports running virtual 64 bit guest operating systems.

The VMWare Guest Check utility can be downloaded from here

The following message appears when your system does not support running 64 bit guest operating systems:

The following message appears when your system does support running 64 bit guest operating systems:

When I checked my Twitter messages today, I came across a message about LiveAndroid. LiveAndroid allows you to run Google’s Android operating system that is used on mobile phones on a x86 platform.

First you need to download the LiveAndroid ISO files. liveandroidv0.2.iso.002 and liveandroidv0.2.iso.001 The ISO file has been splitted due to maximum upload size restrictions. Once you have downloaded both files, run HJ-Split to merge the two files into one ISO file.

Now you can continue setting up a Virtual Machine. Android is based on the Linux kernel 2.6 so that is what I selected during the Virtual Machine Setup. As a hard disk type i used IDE and assigned 256 MB RAM. I tried with less memory before, but got strange results like not having a mouse pointer etc.

Once you have completed the virtual machine configuration, you simply boot the guest OS from the liveandroidv0.2.iso file.

Boot Screen

Desktop (or whatever it’s called)

Menu

Anything about IT mobile page (launched in Android embedded browser)

You can always return to the main desktop by pressing the ESC key.

LiveAndroid Project http://code.google.com/p/live-android/
LiveAndroid readme http://code.google.com/p/live-android/wiki/readme
LiveAndroid Howto http://code.google.com/p/live-android/wiki/howtouse
LiveAndroid download http://code.google.com/p/live-android/downloads/list

One of the key hardware related prerequisites when using Virtualization software is RAM. To improve performance of my virtual environment that I have running on my notebook, I had ordered an additional memory module of 2 GB RAM.

After having added the additional 2 GB of RAM i started the VMWare Workstation and booted the Windows 7 and  Windows Server 2003 guest systems. Before starting these I had of course raised the assigned amount of memory for each guest system.

To my surprise performance did not significantly improve, even worse there was a lot of disk activity due to memory swapping (as I found out afterwards).

To keep the story short, what seemed to have happened is that VMWare Workstation did not take notice of the increased amount of RAM, and therefore the Memory configuration within VMWare Workstation was still configured based on the previously available amount of memory. After having adjusted the Memory configuration, performance was greatly improving.

Today I wanted to find out a little bit more about the differences between VMWare ESX and ESXi. Since it doesn’t make sense that i rewrite what others have written already let me share the sources i have found.

ESX and ESXi comparison from VMWare

How does VMware ESXi Server compare to ESX Server? from David Davis on Virtualization.com

The Architecture of VMWare ESXi from VMWare

ESX and ESXi comparison from the Virtual Troll

Additionally find a comparison between VMWare ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V here, but in all fairness like many experts say, currently we’re talking about two different leagues here. Additionally note that this comparison is provided by VMWare and we all know that when a product vendor creates comparisons themselves they are of course to highlight their own features over the competitors product.

Tomorrow there are plans to move some VMWare slices into Hyper-V. In preparation of that i have found the following article on TechNet

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverhyperv/thread/ef8c12f7-c45d-442e-9a30-c43cd87df3b3/

and on vmToolkit there is a the tool VMDK to VHD converter that should help doing the job, so far for the theory, hope it works out.

Finally after several attempts, i’ve been able to install VMWare ESXi into VMware Workstation 6.5. The intend of doing this is purely to get familiar with the product. To get this done, i have been mainly following the instructions provided by xtravirt.com

Once installed i had some challenges with transfering files through the Virtual Infrastructure Client datastore browser where i received I/O errors. After some troubleshooting it appears to be related to the network , switch configuration which i haven’t solved yet. The workaround i used for the time being is to configure the ESXi vmware network setting to “host” only instead of “Bridged”.

Another interesting learning was that ESXi officially does not provide support for SSH, but this can be enabled thorugh an unsupported hack which is described here. Once ssh is enabled, you can also transfer files to the datastore using WinSCP.

I must have missed this somehow VMWare finally released VMWare Workstation 6.5. For those that didn’t notice it too, here’s the release notes. It does note make sense here to list any of the highlights as there are just too many of them, all described within the release notes. Well…. for those that like automation, have a look at vmrun.

And of course there is also the VMWare Player 2.5.

Earlier i wrote about how to extend you virtual disk , although I have not been able to test , verify this new feature myself, from the documentation provided, it looks like ESX Server 3.5 Update 2 provides hot virtual extend support.

http://www.verboon.info/?p=4

Hot Virtual Extend Support – The ability to extend a virtual disk while virtual machines are running is provided. Hot extend is supported for vmfs flat virtual disks without snapshots opened in persistent mode

http://www.vmware.com/support/vi3/doc/vi3_esx35u2_vc25u2_rel_notes.html#whatsnew

Today i ran out of diskspace on one of my systems that runs within a vmware session. The system disk only had 10 GB and I needed to add another 10 GB.

This is what i did:

1. Extend the disk in offline mode by running the following command: C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Workstation>vmware-vdiskmanager -x 20GB “C:\Users\Alex\Documents\Virtual Machines\Server 2003 – sysmanage\Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition-cl1.vmdk”
   It then takes a while until the disk is expanded.
2. Boot the system from WinPE 2.0
3. I then ran the following commands: diskpart
4. list disk
5. list volume
6. select volume=1 (in my case volume 1 is the volume that i had extended)
7. extend
8. Reboot the system and done.

You might have experienced that your WIM files seem to grow in size when editing the image. Of course it does, because you add content, but what if you replace files.. well it still grows, exactly by the size of the file(s) you replace. So when replacing larger content within your WIM images they might become bigger as you want.To get the WIM file resized simply perform an export by using imagex.exe.