Innovative Technology Weblog

In an act of “endeavoring to deliver a release with support [that] customers deem important” VMware accidentally left a licensing timebomb enabled in the build that it shipped to customers about three weeks ago. The timebomb causes all installed licenses for ESX to be regarded as invalid on August 12, 2008. This in turn causes virtual machines to not be allowed to start from a powerdown or suspended state or allow virtual machines to be VMotioned to another ESX host.

VMware provides one way to prevent encountering the problem and one temporary workaround until they can provide a patch: VMware has released express patches to remedy the problem.

Full repeat of VMware’s latest e-mail advisory:

Dear VMware Customers,

We have released the express patches for the product expiration issue. Please go to http://www.vmware.com/go/esxexpresspatches for download and KB articles. Since our last customer email we have completed our verification tests that the express patches we’ve released are fully compatible with the VMware Update Manager. Please see the KB articles for deployment information regarding Update Manager.

The KB articles are kept up-to-date. Please refer to the KB articles for information and updates.

In our last update, we referred to an initiative by our support and engineering teams to find an option to apply the patch without the necessity of entering maintenance mode and VMotion of VM’s to other servers, or VM power-off and re-power-on. Our earlier tests have not found a consistently successful way to address this. We continue to investigate this possibility, as we know that it would reduce the maintenance burden on our customers who may not have a patched server available for VMotion.

We are on target to release updated versions of the ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 patch at 6 PM PST today. This is for customers who have not already upgraded to the previously released version of ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2

Thank you,

The VMware ESX Product Team

Problem:

An issue has been discovered by many VMware customers and partners with ESX Update 2 (build number 103909) and ESXi 3.5 Update 2 (build number 103908) where Virtual Machines fail to power on or VMotion successfully. This problem began to occur on August 12, 2008 for customers that had upgraded to ESX 3.5 Update 2. The problem is caused by a build timeout that was mistakenly left enabled for the release build.

The following message is displayed in the vmware.log file for the virtual machine:

This product has expired. Be sure that your host machine’s date and time are set correctly.
There is a more recent version available at the VMware web site: http://www.vmware.com/info?id=4.
————–
Module License Power on failed.

Affected Products:

- VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2 & ESXi 3.5 Update 2. Thank you, The VMware ESX Product Team

- The problem will be seen if ESX350-200806201-UG is applied to a system.

- No other VMware products are affected.

Resolution:

VMware Engineering has produced express patches for impacted customers to resolve the issue

A few months ago my beloved colleague Walter gave me the Beta version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Unfortunately I haven’t had the time to play with it until now. While most people enjoy their well earned vacation, I’m playing around with SCVMM.

There are definitely things to be excited about:

• Ability to manage both Hyper-V and VMware farms
• Migrate virtual machines between Hyper-V hosts (maybe not a live migration, but a migration none the less! )
• But the main thing to be excited about is the future integration within the System Center family.

And their are also some irritating things:

• Hyper-V has just RTM’ed and SCVMM is still in beta. This means you got to install update after update to make everything work.
• When I try to install the integration services on Windows Vista it comes with the message: “Unsupported Guest OS - An error has occurred: The specified program requires a newer version of Windows.” Unfortunately I’m not yet in the possession of Windows 7… 
• I created a new library share. But when I try to mount an ISO file to my virtual machine it fails and the only thing you can do with your virtual machine from that point is remove it and repair it. Through the repair option you can save him by the way.

I properly can go on and on with these things but I can rather posts these on connect.microsoft.com. It is still a beta and I believe eventually these ‘minor’ issues will be solved.

There is one very interesting feature I found in SCVMM and I’m still not sure if it’s a brilliant or stupid thing. When you create a new virtual machine you got to choose your processor type. Not just the number of virtual processors or the clock rate, no actually the processor type. Like the 1.2 Ghz Athlon, the 3.0 Ghz Pentium 4 (HT Technology) or the 2.8 Ghz Xeon MP.

It states that it uses this info to determine the processor requirements of the virtual machine. That’s being used when calculating host ratings and when setting CPU resource allocations.
You can view the host rating when you create a new virtual machine. The host rating helps you to choose the best host for your virtual machine. Based on free resources.
CPU resource allocation is something we know from VMware ESX. VMware uses shares to do this. A plain number like 1000 or 2000. The virtual machine with 2000 shares gets twice the amount of CPU cycles (when needed) in comparison with the machine that has 1000 shares.

I understand that SCVMM should use his own system that can be plotted on all the different virtualization platforms it’s going to manage (Hyper-V, XEN, ESX). But I don’t understand how a 2.4 Ghz Opteron relates to a 2.4 Ghz Xeon.
So if I just want my production server to have a 50% preference over my test server which should I choose? And what’s worse, if I’m in doubt with this option, how about a self service user that’s got the option to create a new virtual machine? I can imagine it would properly mean that this user got the advise to skip it.

But there is one more thing confusing about this. When you use the Virtual Machine Manager snap in, there is another way to set the processor weight and you can use a simple number!

So if I change the processor type in SCVMM of a virtual machine, you would suspect something to change within this screen. But it doesn’t… Neither does it the other way around.

I’m going to investigate some more but if you got some tips or hints, please post them!

I have had a love/hate relationship with the VMWare Server 2 beta for the last couple of months and today, I’m sorry to say we have parted ways. First up, my quarrel is not with VMWare products as a whole (I still love Workstation and ESX) but frankly with the poor interaction you get with VMWare in their own beta programs. It really is a far, far cry from the type of interaction and feedback you get in the Microsoft beta programs…

I would have been able to live with the lack of interaction if I weren’t having any major problems with the product. But as such things go, I ran into one showstopping problem… It turns out that on my hardware (which is a big, tricked out server that cost a small fortune and which I am not replacing) VMWare Server 2 had major issues correctly virtualizing Windows Server 2008 x64. Just that one OS. Everything else worked fine: Windows 2003 x86 & x64, even Windows 2008 x86 ran without a hitch. It has to be said that this is not a generic problem, since most others either don’t run into the problem (on a HP nx6325 laptop I also have no issues whatsoever), or they just don’t understand why things are breaking. But I’m certainly not the only one, judging from the replies and the 300+ views on the thread I posted in the VMWare Server 2 beta 2 community.

Now, I could manage without Windows 2008 x64 servers for a good while, since Exchange 2007 also runs on Windows 2003 (or if you’re really nuts like me, you can hack the x86 version on Windows 2008 into production ). But now that I’m participating in the Exchange ‘14’ TAP, I just have to have a Windows 2008 x64 machine. Either that or just don’t bother at all.

In my experience with Microsoft Technology Adoption Programs, Microsoft usually goes above and beyond to help their customers if they run into a blocking problem with the product, even if you are the only customer experiencing the problem. The experience with VMWare was pretty much the opposite, unfortunately. I have filed not one but two Support Requests and never have gotten more interaction than the support engineer asking me to run their support-info-gathering script (vm-support.vbs) and attaching the output to the Support Request. After that, either the support engineers go deaf or they just can’t help me anymore

So now I have grown tired of waiting for information that won’t come and I have decided to uninstall VMWare Server 2 and install VMWare Workstation 6 instead. I would’ve installed Hyper-V, but alas my 1st gen AMD Opterons don’t support the CPU Virtualization extensions needed for Hyper-V…

I’m actually quite sad to see VMWare Server 2 go, because I really liked the way you could manage VMWare Server 2 via the standard VMWare Virtual Infrastructure Client, even over the internet. I liked where VMWare Server 2 was going but it seems it was just to immature for my bleeding-edge needs…

Anyway, Workstation 6 has taken over now and my first Exchange ‘14’ server is (virtually) buzzing with a large grin

That’s a dozen more mailboxes to add to the running-Exchange-‘14’-in-production-count, DavidEsp!

On MMS Day 1 the keynote was opened by Bob Muglia (VP Server & Tools Business)

This keynote was all about Dynamic IT, the 10 year vision of Microsoft in how to operate dynamic datacenters. Currently Microsoft is in year 5 of this vision and realy showed some cool stuff in the keynote compared to how we managed our environments 5 years ago. I realy like the vision Microsoft is having on a Dynamic Datacenter using virtualisation, not only on the OS layer but also on the application layer.

In a Dynamic Datacenter all services are devided in 4 layers:

• Hardware
• Hardware Virtualisation
• Application Virtualisation
• Models

The hardware layer can be managed with System Center Configuration Manager, during the keynote Microsoft did a demo on how Dynamic IT is working for server deployment. Just by using Server 2008 Server Roles en Features, a Configuration Manager Task Sequencer and a special plugin from Dell in this sequencer Microsoft was able to install a domain controller unattende on a Dell server. During this unattende installation it was possible to do the RAID settings, BIOS settings and other hardware based setting needed to roll-out the server to be compliant with the rest of the infrastructure. This way there is no need for an administrator to be present in a datacenter and still you will be able to roll out servers.

On the Hardware Virtualisation Layer, Microsoft did a demo of Virtual Machine Manager 2008 beta that was anounced during the keynote. A cool feature of VMM2008 is that it is able to manage VMware ESX servers, so in the near future it will be possible to manage your Virtual environment from 1 tool. This tool also supports Live migration of VMware machines. Like other Microsoft tooling VMM2008 also gives the output of the tasks you perform as an PowerShell script, so administrators that do not master PowerShell still have the abbility to automate repeating tasks.

Microsoft also announced the beta of SCOM Cross Platform Monitoring, that Walter described in last post.

So if you are interested in the slides of the Keynote on day 1 you can watch the here :

Slidedeck Keynote Day 1

Converting some virtual images form our ESX 3.5 environment to a demo machine did have some impact on on my demo machine. The demo machine running the RTM bit of Server 2008 64bits with Hyper-V for some initial testing, did surprise my happily. Fast responses and 10Gb network adapters for internal communication works great and fast. Just a few things I bumped into installing Hyper-V, Hyper-V has a problem with the non-US regional settings. If your installing Hyper-V and don’t have the regional setting to English US the role will not install. Changing the regional settings back to US-English fixed the problem for me.

Installing VMWare workstation 6.0.2 on the demo machine, Server 2008,  was no problem at all. It run fine until you start a virtual machine inside VMWare:-(. The Virtual machine will boot and after 30 sec in the boot process you will get a blue screen on Server 2008, error code 0×0000124. Just uninstall the Hyper-V role, reboot, and the problem is solved.

Hyper-V is still in beta so no hard feelings there. I think Hyper-V alone is a good candidate for server consolidation, in combination with Virtual Machine Manager it could be a lot more for less, Hyper-V only costs $28 extra on top of Server 2008.

Regards,
Walter Eikenboom
http://weblogwally.spaces.live.com

Hi,

I’m at Vmworld 2008 Europe (Cannes) right now. Virtualisation is hot and you can tell by the enormous amount of people that came to Cannes. A lot of interesting new product and enhancements have been release here today but there is one thing I want to mention here.

The Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF). At this point it is still in beta (0.9) but a 1.0 version is coming out very shortly. It’s a new way you on how to offer your virtual appliances and supported by Vmware, Citrix (Xenserver) and Microsoft Hyper-V. You can create your virtual appliance in any of these environments and package it as an OVF package. The virtual appliance can even exist out of multiple virtual machine.

This OVF package can be imported on to any of these hypervisors (that’s the open part of it) and it automatically build the right virtual machine(s) with the correct virtual components (Nic’s, CPU, memory etc). It also builds the correct virtual disk format, VMDK, VHD or even RDM or NTFS.

Read more about this new portable virtual machine format here: http://www.vmware.com/go/ovf

Today I learned about a product called “virtual desktop” from Scriptlogic. Well, I’m not convinced. At first I thought; “okay, this sounds promising”. But now I know it just delivers a management interface to of a lot of user settings. It does prevent spaghetti scripting, but this is exactly where Scriptlogic is coming from; a clever login script. Nothing virtual about it! The virtualization hype at it’s top. Concluding I must state that RES Powerfuse still delivers the strongest uniform desktop experience, but it isn’t cheap, and without any strong competitors I know of.

Today we have network virtualization (VLAN), hardware virtualization (Hypervisor/Veridian), application virtualization (streaming et all) and OS virtualization (like VDI/Virtual PC) - I don’t think we need much more at the moment, because all is virtual that needs to be virtual.

- Paul

Source: xtravirt

Paul Davey from xtravirt wrote a Guide to installing VMware ESX3 on workstation 6.

“This paper illustrates how to install and configure VMware ESX3 Server to run within VMware Workstation 6. From this, VirtualCenter, VMotion, HA and DRS features can be configured.

Although performance is significantly reduced from that of a physical server, this type of environment opens considerable possibilities for portable client demonstrations and is excellent for self training and small lab environments.

This paper assumes the reader has good technical knowledge of VMWare Virtual Infrastructure 3. The paper assumes that you know how to install the VirtualCenter2, License Server and Virtual Infrastructure Client.

The hardware used in this whitepaper was an IBM Thinkpad T60P laptop, Core Duo, 3GB memory, 120GB SATA Hard Disk.

Note: Intel CPU(s) on the hardware running Workstation 6 must have the VT technology or the performance of ESX will be very poor.  It is believed that the same applies with AMD chips with AMD-V compatible CPU’s being recommended, although it is currently untested by us on this platform.”

Regards,
Stefan Stranger
http://weblog.stranger.nl

I am enjoying Longhorn beta 3 at the Longhorn TAP event in Seattle.

I have got a little stampede going on. On my Vista box, a Dell 810 with 2 GB of ram, I’m able to run 4 Virtual Longhorn Beta instances.

Two core installs and two regular installs, one of the regulars is a Domain Controller.

I think I could another one or maybe two instances when I close a couple of other open programs, but because I’m running all from my local disk I have some limitations because of the amount of free diskspace

 

Rob

 

 

Application virtualization on the desktop is hot. Not only will it deliver a future proof set of application “scripts” but it also promisis a very fast way of deploying up-to-date, non-conflicting software. But of course! You’ve had a lot of work, I mean months and months of testing, in creating MSI packages. Throwing that away is not a very strong business case to move to app virtualization. For that issue I ran into a nice tool that is capable of automating the migration effort. Check out www.softgridguru.com too.

If you have chosen Softgrid as your app virtualization platform you need to create streams or sequences. To migrate an MSI into a stream automatically check out this tool (registration is required). Although it’s “just” a program around the command line sequencer, it makes life a lot easier.

If you have choosen Altiris SVS as your app virtualization platform you can use the Wise Package studio for easy migration. So lets hope you did not just buy Installshield…. Also the Altiris suite includes tooling to assist your migration and packaging efforts.

Finally, if you have a Citix farm you should towards Presentation Server 4.5. This version includes application streaming technology. But I haven’t heard from migration tooling here (yet). Suggestions are welcome.

For now this is all just theory. In the coming months I expect lessons learned to become more widely available as migration efforts get finalized. Pls post your comments if you’ve allready done it!

- Paul