A special thanks for this post from Alan Gordon: In recent months I have had a lot of questions regarding to to migrate physical serves to VM’s. And while VMware provides an excellent tool (VMware converter) for migrating physical machines / server , this tool does unfortunately not support OS X as a source…..VMware hint hint !! So what are your options? Fortunately VMware has ported their vmware-vdiskmanager tool and vmware-rawdiskCreator tool to OS X as part of their VMware Fusion package ! These two tools provide a very easy way to convert the hard drives of a physical machine to the needed virtual disk format (vmdk). In the following I…
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Change the IP/Host Name on ESX iSCSI Initiators
Setting up iSCSI to work with ESX is usually a pretty straight forward affair. But like with many things, change can be hard. But sometimes things get moved to different subnets or storage gets replaced. To configure a vSphere client to connect, select a virtual machine and then click on it and click on the Configuration tab. From there, click on Storage Adapters using the Hardware panel. From the Hardware Panel, click on an initiator and then click on Properties and then click on Configure. Then provide the new name or IP. Make sure that the name is unique and then if needed provide an iSCSI alias. Then change the IP settings…
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Open Directory Requires 2 CPUs
I was recently experimenting with Parallels to run some Lion Server VMs and I must have wasted a couple of hours trying to get Lion Server up and running as a Profile Manager host in a VM. Then I had the good sense to complain to Arek Dreyer, who I’m guessing had complained to Andrina Kelly who had, well, answered the riddle. Apparently you need to enable a second core in order to promote to an Open Directory Master in Parallels. To enable said second CPU, open Parallels, go to the configure screen for the VM and then make sure CPUs is set to some number higher than 1. Who…
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Registering VMs w/ VMware ESX & ESXi
To register a virtual machine using VMware’s ESX and ESXi is a pretty straight forward process. You will use the vmware-cmd and vmware-cmd.pl respectively. On ESX, simply issues the vmware-cmd followed by the path to your vmx file and then the register verb. For example, if the path to the vmx were /VMs/XP/xp.vmx then you would use the following command to register that virtual machine to ESX: vmware-cmd /VMs/XP/xp.vmx register ESXi (and vSphere) are just a bit more complex (what, bein’ perl and all). You will need to define the -H for the host, the -U for username and the -P for password as well. The path to the vmx…
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Installing Ubuntu 10 in Fusion
I’ve done a number of articles on using Ubuntu 10 as a server recently, but haven’t actually looked at doing the base installation of an Ubuntu 10 host. In this example, I’ll look at using Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop. In many of the previous examples I’ve been looking at Ubuntu 10.10 Server; the reason I’m using 10.04 Desktop here is because I believe there is a smaller learning curve and that inherently Mac OS X Systems Administrators who might be following this thread actually like a GUI. There are a number of aspects of this type of setup that are simply not GUI oriented; however, the base OS can easily be,…
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Headless VMware Fusion
You can run VMware Fusion 2 in what is commonly referred to as headless mode. This option is not yet available in Fusion 3, but is handy when you do not want to authenticate at the loginwindow of Mac OS X in order to run virtual machines using the vmware-vmx process. To enable headless mode, first run the following command: defaults write com.vmware.fusion fluxCapacitor -bool YES You will then see a Headless option in the View menu. You can toggle it on and off there. If you wish to to then disable headless mode: defaults write com.vmware.fusion fluxCapacitor -bool NO While you are in headless mode, you will find it…
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Checking Free Space in vSphere
Most of us will be familiar with the df command. But in ESX, you use the vdf command, located in /usr/sbin. Running the vdf command will net you similar output to what you see with df. Simply run the following to see free space on each of your disks: vdf -h You can also list all of your data stores to correlate the vdf output with esxcfg: /usr/sbin/esxcfg-scsidevs -c Or to list LUNs: /usr/sbin/esxcfg-mpath -L BTW, if you’re running out of free space, in my experience, first look to your snapshots and check how much space they’re consuming…
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Goodbye OpenSolaris/OpenStorage, Hello OpenFiler/OpenDedup
I’ve read a number of reports over the past couple of days that indicate the demise of Project Wonderland and Open Solaris. As it is open source I would not be surprised to see the project continue, even if forked and retitled in some way. Oracle will continue selling Solaris, but “nothing is for free” is about to take on a whole new meaning. For now it seems that any plans around packaging services around the FOSS stack surrounding former Sun products should be put on hold until further official announcements are made. “So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las…
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VMware Acquires Zimbra
See the Zimbra site for more information: http://www.zimbra.com Mail has to live somewhere – might as well be on an EMC…
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Monitoring Amazon ec2 Instances
InterMapper has a solution for monitoring instances of the popular Amazon cloud solution, ec2. Using InterMapper’s Cloud Monitor, you can monitor up to 5 virtual machines that are running for free. If you are just getting started and find that you would like some visibility into the performance of your ec2 instances then this solution is one that will allow you to get into the testing and management without having to incur a large expenditure. And Cloud Monitor is build on top of Amazon’s Cloud Watch, meaning that it provides the most granular and up-to-date stats available for your instances, based on Amazon’s own tools. I’ve been finding that when…