Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between
My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together
Monthly Archives: May 2009
Vista – clearing out some space
Posted by on May 29, 2009
I have had Vista RTM installed on my current laptop since it was released, I’m always running out of disk space – I just have an .iso and VM hording habit!
However I recently upgraded my laptop from a 100Gb disk to a 200Gb one, thinking that should be more than enough (famous last words..)
But not 3 months later I’m out of space again, but this time I’ve even purged all the VMs I no longer use and I am still looking at an OS/app footprint of tens of Gb, so I did some digging and aggressive housekeeping and turned up a lot of downloaded and old application data that has built up over the last couple of years.
I used TreeSize Free which is great for sniffing around all those obscure and redirected Windows folders (screenshot below is after some general housekeeping, but still!)
My data not unexpected and I can live with this
with a bit of digging I found the worst culprit(s) that I didn’t know about, AppData so I did a bit of exploring…
The size of the AppData\Windows folder was a bit of a surprise, as was the size of the temp internet files folder as I exclusively use Firefox, however this is temp files where IE is embedded into MS apps like Outlook and Office and this is where it stores its temp files.
The 95Mb Explorer directory was mainly thumbnail cache databases
It seems lots of apps use this directory to store their data (as the name would suggest 🙂 but don’t clean up after you’ve uninstalled them – Xobni, I’m pointing the finger at you, Spotify and Google Earth also seem to keep data here, assume that’s a cache of downloaded content.
Apple seem to leave old iPod updates in here too
Next up, C:\ProgramData
Microsoft Search cache seems pretty big, but it’s useful
Apple everything… thanks for eating up all my disk space, I’m sure I need to keep iTunes 7.x ready to install!
and finally C:\Windows
700Mb of temp files! and when I looked into it there were over 12,000 files
So, in summary – TreeSize Free is an excellent tool for going exploring and visualising your actual folder by folder disk usage, you can also delete folder from within it.
by doing this I regained a serious amount of useful disk space!
Cheap vSphere Server
Posted by on May 21, 2009
If you have a home lab setup or want to get going with learning VMware’s new vSphere product you will need an x64 capable machine to run it on, although it does also run under VMware Workstation too – even supporting nested VMs and physical ESX to virtual ESX vMotion! unfortunately it won’t run on my trusty old HP D530 desktops which I’ve used to run ESX 3.5 over the last year or so.
My lab setup uses a couple of HP ML110 servers, they are low-cost and pretty capable boxes, for example they both have 8Gb of RAM and cost me less than £350 GBP each with RAM and disks (although I’ve added storage from my spares pile).
If you are in the UK Servers Plus have some great deals on HP ML series servers which are great for home lab setups – see some of Techhead’s postings on his findings with the ML1xx range here
Linkage to Servers Plus £199 +VAT servers here (www.serversplus.com) if you tell them vinf.net or techhead.co.uk sent you they may cut you a deal on delivery as they have done in the past (no promises as I’ve not had a chance to speak to them).
A note of caution if you are looking to try out the cool FT features of vSphere you will need to purchase specific CPUs, which may be more expensive – there is a good list of compatible CPUs on Erics blog here and some more reading here
Check before you buy you can lookup the manufacturers part code to check with CPU each model has – or check with the supplier.
The CPUs I have in my dual-core Xeon ML110G5 is not compatible with FT 😦
but it does look like the AMD quad-cores may be compatible, but check 1st – don’t take my word for it I HAVE NOT TRIED IT but I would like to if someone wants to donate one 🙂UPDATE: the ML110G5 with the AMD Quad Core CPU IS VMware FT compatible – see link here for more details; I am ordering one now!
If you are interested – here are some performance charts from my home lab running vSphere RC on an HP ML110 with 8Gb RAM and 2 x 160Gb SATA HDD’s whilst doing various load tests of Exchange 2007 and Windows 2008 with up to 500 concurrent heavy profile users (these stats are not particularly scientific but give you an idea of what these boxes can do, I’ve been more than happy with mine and I would recommend you get some for your lab)
These are some general screengrabs, note there are lots of warnings showing – this is what happens when you thin-provision all your VM’s and then one fills up rapidly making the VMFS volume itself run out of space – you have been warned!
I’m running 15 VMs on one ML110, the 2nd box only has 1 VM on it as I wanted to see how far I could push one box, I’ve not found a real limit yet! it runs a mix of Windows 2003/2008 virtual machines, and it doesn’t generally break a sweat – note the provisioned vs. used space columns – Thin Provisioning 🙂 and I’m also over-subscribing the RAM significantly.
vSphere Downloads
Posted by on May 21, 2009
Now it’s out these screengrabs show you the downloadable binaries
Still has the classic (with service console) and ESXi versions
vCenter and all it’s utilities
vCenter heartbeat, Data recovery and vShield zones, interesting that they have packaged data recovery manager and vShield Zones into one {large!} download.
No Cisco Nexus NX1000V on the VMware.com site, but you can register for a free 60 day eval here
vSphere, Come and Get it
Posted by on May 21, 2009
Well today is the day, GA or general availability of VMware’s new flagship product – vSphere (formerly known as Virtual Infrastructure 3).
The VMware.com homepage is showing the download link for a free 60 day trail.
download page is here
for some of my vSphere articles and many more check out these links
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/04/21/vsphere-linkage/
https://vinf.net/2009/02/26/hands-on-lab-01-vsphere-features-overview/
https://vinf.net/2009/05/08/vsphere-rc-ram-under-vmware-workstation-how-low-can-you-go/
ExPrep – Script to Automate Exchange 2007 Pre-Requisite Installation
Posted by on May 13, 2009
If you have ever had to install Exchange 2007 on a Windows 2008 (and 2003) server you will know that there are a number of pre-requisites that need to be installed from the OS for each role; for example IIS web services and metabase compatibility components.
You have two choices, do this via the UI using the add/remove features and roles Wizard in Server Manager or using the ServerManagerCmd.EXE command line utility – either way it’s pretty tedious to do if you have several servers to install.
Based on this handy reference from Microsoft I have built a very basic batch file that automates the installation of the pre-req components for you.
It only works on Windows 2008 (sorry no 2003 equivalent) and you use it entirely at your own risk – there are much cleverer ways of scripting this but I’m a pretty old skool DOS person, this works for me and is easy for me to maintain – feel free to re-write in something more modern and post it back here this code is probably quite hacky.
The contents of the file are here (just cut & paste into a .bat file)
|
@echo off REM ExPrep.bat by Simon Gallagher, ioko (http://vinf.net) REM YOU USE THIS SCRIPT ENTIRELY AT YOUR OWN RISK SET %EXPREP%=999 echo Preparing for base pre-req install ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Metabase echo you chose %EXPREP% if %EXPREP%==1 goto MBX goto end :MBX goto end :MBX-CLUSTER ServerManagerCmd -i Failover-Clustering goto end :CAS ServerManagerCmd -i RPC-over-HTTP-proxy goto end :HT :END |
Instructions:
1) Copy the script (ExPrep.bat) to your would-be Exchange server (remember Windows 2008 x64 is the only supported OS for Exchange 2007).
2) Run ExPrep.bat
3) Choose the appropriate role from the menu (note: there is no clever input validation – make sure you choose the correct one, there are pause statements before it actually does anything so you can CTRL-C to break out.
4) Sit back and wait for it to complete.
5) then run the Exchange 2007 installer from your DVD or network share as normal.
If you need to install multiple roles on a single server you can run the script multiple times, all changes are cumulative and if a component is already installed ServerManagerCmd.EXE (which the script calls) will just skip it.
If you wanted to take it further there is some excellent information about the setup process, failures and doing full unattended installations of Exchange 2007 here and here
Remember you use this entirely at your own risk, and you assume full responsibility for checking its suitability for your environment; the batch file is easy to read and customize for your own use, although I ask that if you do make changes link back here via a comment or trackback so that other people can benefit.
vSphere RC RAM Under VMware Workstation: How Low Can You Go?
Posted by on May 8, 2009
Getting ESX (in it’s various versions) to run under VMware Workstation has proven to be a very popular article on this blog, if you are a consultant who has to do product demos of VI3/vSphere or are studying for your VCP it’s a very useful thing to be able to do on your own laptop rather than rely on remote connections or lugging around demo kit.
Good news; the RC build of vSphere will boot under the latest VMware Workstation build (6.5.2) without any of the .vmx hackery you had to do in previous versions and it seems quite fast to boot.
Bad news: the RC build of vSphere needs at least 2GB of RAM to boot, this is a problem for a laptop with 4GB of RAM as it means you can only really run one at a time.
Luckily: Duncan Epping (or VCDX 007; licenced to design :)) has discovered how you can hack the startup script to allow it to run in less than 2GB of RAM – details here, this isn’t officially supported – but it does work.
In the interests of science I did some experimentation with VM’s with various amounts of decreasing RAM to see what the bare minimum RAM you can get away with for a VM’d version of vSphere RC.
The magic number seems to be 768Mb of RAM, if you allocate less than this to the VM then it results in a Purple Screen of Death (PSOD) at boot time.
Note – this may change for the GA/RTM final version – but these are my findings for RC
The relevant section of my /etc/vmware/init/init.d/00.vmnix file looks like the following (note it won’t actually boot with 512mb assigned to the VM)
Some screen captures of the vSphere RC boot process below
And finally the boot screen once it’s finished – it takes 2-3 mins with 768Mb of RAM on my laptop to get to this boot screen.
I am doing this on a Dell D620 with 4Gb RAM and Intel VT enabled in the BIOS, running Vista x86 and VMware Workstation v6.5.2 build 156735
I haven’t tried, but I assume I can’t power on VM’s under this instance of vSphere but I can connect them to a vCenter 4 machine and practice with all the management and configuration tools.
Happy tweaking…
Importing vCenter 2.5 Customization Specifications into vCenter 4
Posted by on May 7, 2009
If you have a lot of customization specifications setup in your vCenter server you are likely to want to copy these to your vSphere/vCenter 4 lab or production system when it’s released, otherwise it’s a bit tedious typing it all in again 🙂
The following steps show how to export and then import your guest customization specifications into vCenter 4 you have to do them one by one as there is no multi-select available.
First, export the settings from the vCenter 2.5 server using the VI client connected to the vCenter 2.5 server (not the ESX host)
Then save each one out as an .XML file
Then connect your VI client to your vCenter 4 server (not the vSphere host itself) and go to the home view and click on the Customization Specifications Manager icon
Then click import and choose the .XML file you exported previously
Click OK and it will import the template
if you have encrypted passwords stored in your customization template then you will be prompted to re-enter them (unless you used a real certificate or PKI across both hosts)
It will then run you through the guest customization wizard to re-enter the password, but don’t worry all the other settings are retained you only need to re-type the password.
Once you’ve been through this process the customization specification is now available for use when you deploy from a template within vCenter 4.
Other than that the overall template process is similar to the VI3 process that I wrote about a while ago here
Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between 