Dmitri on Virtualization

With my terrible memory on numbers, every now and then I need to look up which versions of EsX Server lives well with which version Virtual Center. Here comes the draft, as of Jan 08, 2008.

VMWare Virtual Infrastructure Versions:
as for Jan 08, 2008:

VMware Infrastructure Foundation (Starter) is a package that includes:

VMware ESX Server
VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS)
VMware Symmetric Multi Processing (vSMP)
VirtualCenter Agent
VMware Consolidated Backup
VMware Update Manager

Virtual Center is sold separately.

ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5:

ESX Server 3.5 | 12/10/2007 | Build 64607
ESX Server 3i version 3.5 Embedded | 12/20/2007 | Build 65301
VirtualCenter 2.5 | 12/10/2007 | Build 64201

ESX Server 3.0 and VirtualCenter 2.0:

ESX Server 3.0.2 and VirtualCenter 2.0.2     07/2007
ESX Server 3.0.1 and VirtualCenter 2.0.1    09/2006
ESX Server 3.0 and VirtualCenter 2.0        06/2006

EsX 2.x and Virtual Center 1.x

10/08/2007 | ESX Server 2.5.5 Build 57619
10/05/2006 | ESX Server 2.5.4 Build 32233
04/13/2006 | ESX Server 2.5.3 Build 22981
09/15/2005 | ESX Server 2.5.2 Build 16390
06/20/2005 | ESX Server 2.5.1 Build 14182
11/29/2004 | ESX Server 2.5.0 Build 11343

VMware VirtualCenter 1.4.1     9/28/06
VMware VirtualCenter 1.3.1     12/22/05
VMware VirtualCenter 1.2     12/1/04
VMware VirtualCenter 1.1    8/06/04
VMware VirtualCenter 1.0    3/31/04

Virtualization is simple, that is the beauty. Everything that works in physical domain holds true in virtual world. You build a VM as if it was a physical box, or just run P2V to virtualize your PC, and ola! it all works.

But to take a full advantage of virtualization, there are hundreds of tricks to configure VM efficiently.

For example, a virtual Hard Disk may be marked independent; in such case it won’t be included in snapshots. I want to snapshot all your data? But how about the system swap partition? I don’t even want it to be persistent!

With Linux the swap file is on dedicated partition. Move it to a dedicated HF, make it independent/non-persistent. Do the same with Windows VM: add new 4Gb HD, configure it as independent/non-persistent, and move page file there.

Or, consider slimming down the OS. Again, that is no news for the Linux world. But why don’t cut some fat from chubby Windows? Mind you it is a lot of fat to loose: almost 50%. The installation of XP with 300Mb foot print, how is that? Not the limit! And after such “slim fast” program Windows can sprint: you should see it booting up!

For ideas on stripping down your Windows, check here and here (rulez!). Or, just fire your Torrent and get the Performance Edition here.

Using optimized and fine-tuned virtual machines can change your experience with virtualization. Keep on looking for secrets.

I was searching for companies offering Virtual Machine hosting. Turned out it is not plenty. And I got an impression that web hosting community is a bit behind on virtualization wave. For them virtualization is Virtuozzo more then VMWare. There is very very few offering of virutual hosting “powered by” VMWare, Xen or Microsoft.

I wonder why and keep the research to get to the bottom of this.

Technorati profile.

I finally managed to run my Subversion Virtual Appliance off the flash drive. It took a lot of trying and learning. The bottom line is it runs! and runs better then I dared to expect.

I use 4GB Kingston USB 2.0 jump drive. Performance was a biggest challenge to overcome. With trials and errors I settled down to using a single large .vmdk and formatting USB drive to NTFS, and performance boosted.

Now it works like this. I insert USB key. Few seconds - removable storage got connected.  Launch VMWare - another 5 seconds. The Subversion VM is kept suspended on the flash drive. Resume! - takes 15 seconds to bring it back up. At this point it is fully functional.

Rebooting VM is slightly slower,

Testing CheckOut: I  and got all 80 files (55Mb) to a new folder in 10 sec, exactly as when VM was running of the laptop harddrive.

The pay-off for NTFS is that now it takes time for the file system to commit the changes. So I need to wait for about a minute before the system allows me to “safely remove” the flash.  But I don’t mind.

The way it works now is absolutely exciting My source control appliance lives in my pocket, doesn’t pollute the system, run off any other computer, and easy to back up.

I love my Virtual Subversion. Except the hard drive size. 120G is ridiculously large for a virtual machine. Especially when I broke it by 2G peaces to run it off a flash-drive: I just couldn’t stand looking at these 60 .vmdk files!And I don’t think my repo would ever take 120G. If you think you would, check this out.

So I decided to resize the Virtual Hard drive to make it smaller, say 10 Gb instead of 120Gb. Resizing the drive is easy, as long as you expand it. But shrinking the virtual hard disk is as hard as then shrinking a physical one. Vmware-vdiskmanager can only expand. And don’t confuse –k option: it does shrinks the vmdk file, but doesn’t alter the Hard Disk size.
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Virtual appliance idea is lovely.

You are a .NET developer, starting a small software project. It comes along, and you feel it is time for source control. You want to use Subversion because friends say it is cool and fancy. But installing and configuring subversion is a mess and a pain. You are reluctant, if you never did it. And intimidated, if you have already tried.

The answer is Virtual Appliances. Look how lovely:

I download a virtual appliance with subversion installed and preconfigured. Power up a Virtual machine; with couple of touches my subversion server is up and running. No mess on my laptop. No dusty ubuntu box in the corner. No installing Apache, no configuring subversion. All is prepared and packaged professionally. I bring up the VM when you need it, and where you need it. In the morning, check out, in the evening, check in. The rest of the day it can sleep as a file on my pocket USB hard drive. As the team grows we will run it 24/7 on the network server. Sounds ideal for a small mobile team.

Reality check.

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Why would you ever wants to install Virtual Server inside a VM? R&D or Demo Lab. My use case is building a portable lab for testdriving System Center Virtual Machine Manager Beta 2 on laptop with WinXP.  Ideally, I would have a single fully functional VM with all VMM components, that manages the Virtual Server on the host laptop. But VMM agent doesn’t install on XP.  So I attempted to install Virtual Server on the Virtual Server VM running Win2k3.

Is it possible? Short answer is NO.  Virtua Server intalls on VM no problem, but fails to start: “Virtual Server encountered an unexpected error, 0×00000003.”. Let’s have some fun and install Virtual Server on VMWare! What now? Pretty much the same, only the error message is obscure: “Virtual Server encountered an unexpected error, 0×00000003.” No luck

Is this NO final? Never say never. People thought it wasn’t possible to install EsX inside a VM until VMWare Workstation 6.0. But someone knowledgeble shared with me that it was all possible well before, with secret tricks well kept in VMWare. There might be a trick kept in Microsoft. Or you might know, then please leave a comment!

Simple. I do think virtualization is a next software frontier. I am playing with it. Here I host my scrapbook to keep the notes. Here I post my thoughts and ideas to share with other virtualization enthusiasts. Drop by.