Everything-Virtual

Category: Uncategorised

  • VMware STOP: 0x0000005d Error

    In my work I deal with our System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (Config Mgr) environment and ensure that it’s configured and running correctly, part of that is working on the Operating System Deployment (OSD) functionality, for the last couple of weeks I have been creating Windows 2008 R2 images and doing lots of testing in my VMware vSphere environment. With the 2008 R2 builds all working correctly the next step was working on the 2003 R2 builds, so using vSphere I have been building up 4 different flavours of Windows 2003 (Standard and Enterprise x64 and x86 architecture). Using the New Virtual Machine wizard I have created the machines with the correct OS types and built and patched the servers up to the latest patch levels, I also installed the Config Mgr client and placed the contents of the deploy.cab file into the C:\Sysprep folder. When I was ready I inserted my OSDCapture ISO file and let the autorun program launch, this was created on the Config Mgr console and in my case uses the x64 WIN-PE boot media (the majority of my environment is 64bit).

    All was fine with capture process until the server rebooted, it reboots after Sysprep has run to actually capture the image (either locally to an additional disk or to a network location) but as soon as I rebooted I was presented with the following screen.

    stop5d

    A little search around and I found out that the reason for this is due to the WIN-PE image being used is different from the original Win 2003 OS, one is 32bit whilst the other is 64bit, shutting down the OS and changing the OS version Architecture type from 32 to 64bit and rebooting allowed the capture process to continue.

    If you encounter this error in the future make sure that you change your hardware profile to reflect the change in OS architecture type.

  • VMware Workstation 8 Released

    I have used VMware Workstation 7 for the last year or so and I have been really impressed with it (as a solution for virtualisation on my laptop rather than my in-house lab). So when VMware announced the release of VMware Workstation 8 today I immediately purchased the upgrade.

    The upgrade purchase process was very easy and the upgrade site automatically populated the previous versions serial number which allowed me to purchase the upgrade product at the reduced price of $99 or £67.55 instead of the usual price of $199 or £135.50.

    Installation took about 10 minutes on my Dell E6410 and unlike my Acronis upgrades didn’t require entering the previous product key to carry out the installation.

    image

    Some of the blurb on the improved VMware Workstation product.

  • Run over 600 different operating systems right on your PC. Prove your mastery of the PC and run from DOS to Windows 7
  • Run the most demanding applications in a virtual machine with 8 virtual processors or 8 virtual cores, 2 TB virtual disks and up to 64 GB of memory per virtual machine
  • Move to the internal cloud. Build and test your virtual machines locally and then drag and drop to move them directly to VMware vSphere
  • Remotely connect to virtual machines running on VMware vSphere anywhere on your network to leverage not only your local PC but the internal cloud
  • Run as a server to share virtual machines with your team, department, or anyone in your organization with enterprise calibre control over user access
  • and much more.

  • VMware VCP 5 (VCP 511) Training Requirements – Updated

    VMware recently updated the requirements for the VCP 5 upgrade, for a limited time VCP3’s can now upgrade to the VCP5 by attending the What’s New (5.0) course, like the earlier requirements this also has a best before date of Feb 29th 2012.

    VMW-VCP5-105c

    The VCP 511 Exam Blueprint can be found here

  • How To – Restore a deleted WordPress post

    A couple of days ago I made a mistake on my blog and accidently overwrote one of my posts, it was whilst using the excellent Windows Live Writer and was absolutely nothing to do with the software, it was entirely a PEBKAC issue.

    pebcak_20898

    The mistake was that I took an existing post (first part in a multipart series) and edited it to make the second part of the article (I am used to Word documents). In this case it was only after I posted up the draft to the website did I realise what I had done.

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  • Building an Iomega PX6 Replacement – Part Two

    In part one I discussed how I didn’t want to splash out for an Iomega PX6 due to the poor cost performance figures I had seen for it. I had spent a long time before the PX4 and PX6 units actually shipped trying to decide whether to purchase a unit and in the end I decided against it. Having decided to self build a replacement for the Iomega PX6 I needed to decide on hardware, in part 1 I had already decided on the only mini-itx motherboard out there with 6 Sata3 ports on it, the Zotac M880G.

    In part two we will look at case options for the PX6 Replacement unit.

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  • Building an Iomega PX6 Replacement – Part One

    Having owned a couple of the Iomega IX4-200D’s for nearly a year I have been impressed with the build quality of the units, what I haven’t been overly impressed with was the performance of it, don’t get me wrong the IX4 is a home based storage platform and for that it works wonders but as a SAN\NAS storage device to be used as a datastore for my VMware vSphere environment it can cause me issues if I try powering on multiple VM’s at once (obviously I use Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown rules for the most part) I can have serious performance issues.

    When Iomega announced the release of the PX4 and PX6 I was initially pleased with the idea of a 6 drive NAS that was capable of using a mix of SSD and Platter based disks but the more I looked at the PX6 the more I balked at the price when compared to the performance figures I had seen for it. Paying out the £650 (the cheapest I had found the Diskless PX6 out there, including the 20% discounted price that’s available on Simon Seagraves site couldn’t beat that price) started to sound like a bad idea to me.

    I then decided to see if I could actually build a unit for myself (as some of you are aware I have tested a number of NAS\SAN software based solutions out there already) so I did some investigating and surprised myself with how little there is in the way of cheap performance hardware available BUT, saying that I have found out it is possible to build yourself a PX6 replacement NAS device a lot cheaper than it would cost to purchase the Iomega unit. ** I will caveat this here, I understand that the newer IX4 and PX4/6 units out there do offer more than just network storage but for my needs I need a device that can handle both iSCSI and NFS as well as SSD and Platter based disks. It also needed to be able to perform better than the IX4 and HP MicroServer I currently own.

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  • De-bricking the Iomega IX4-200d

    I recently had a couple of comments on some of my IX4-200d posts asking for some assistance with the IX4, this chap (Johan) had experienced a failure of some sort that left his IX4 dead as a dodo (you all know the signs, a red LED of death and a graphic on the front of the unit that brings a lump to your throat.

    In the case of Johan he had either tried upgrading all the drives on his unit at once (formatting them in the process) or had a catastrophic hardware failure that ensured the disks were wiped clean (Johan, please post a comment here for clarification purposes). Anyway, his request was to see if it would be possible to take a copy of my NAS OS partition and sending it over to him. Now I have to admit that I was a bit loath to take out the disks from either of my two 8TB units as I really didn’t want to risk losing the data but as luck would have it I still had the original 500gb drives from when I upgraded my IX4 earlier on in the year so I told Johan that I would see what I could do.

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  • Installing Raxco PerfectDisk 12 – vSphere Bundle Trial

    I have been a big fan of the Raxco products for a while now so when I heard that they had a new product about to launch I decided to do a blog post about it.

    Raxco launched PerfectDisk12 in June of this year but have already released two Service Packs for the product (one in each subsequent month), I started testing with build 275 but have now upgraded to the latest release (Build 285).

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  • UK VMUG Meeting – 3rd November 2011

    VMUG

    Having attended a couple of #LonVMUG sessions now I knew this was on the cards but in it’s now been officially announced that there is to be a UK VMUG meeting at the the National Motor Cycle Museum on the 3rd of November 2011.


    What is a VMUG you ask? Well it’s a VMware User Group meeting that’s sponsored by companies in the Virtualisation arena and attended by people who work with VMware technologies, it’s a great place to network and meet other like minded people working in different markets and let’s you see how other people are doing things. A lot of the attendees are bloggers, tweeters and the odd author or two or three.

    The event in November is an all day event being run from 08:00 until 17:00 and will feature multiple tracks, keynote speakers and exhibition areas.

    Current sponsors are VMware and HDS (Hitachi Data Systems).

    Registration is now open and can be found on the MyVMUG site, registration is compulsory but free.

  • Installing Openfiler 2.3 onto a USB Flash Drive

    Having played with a number of different flavours of NAS\SAN software on my HP MicroServer one of the limiting factors I found with Openfiler was the fact you had to install it onto a fixed disk, for the most part this isn’t an issue but when you’re talking about the MicroServer and it’s 4 fixed SATA drives (actually 5 if you want to use the single SATA port designed for a CD\DVD drive) then you can find yourself limited on disk usage if you need to dedicate one of the four drives for the Openfiler OS rather than using it as a RAID member.

    I started looking around at the possibility of installing Openfiler onto a USB drive, something that isn’t openly supported on 2.3 and managed to find enough information out there to put together a USB device that can be used for booting Openfiler.

    There are a few decisions that need to be made at the offset, mainly on the size USB flash drive to be used, using something too small will cause issues later on, using something too large will obviously just waste space.

    For my testing I used a 4GB SanDisk Cruzer Blade which has been a great little device that’s already being used in my vSphere hosts successfully and it fits into the MicroServer very nicely.

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