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Support New in 4.0 is support for NetWare 6.5 Service Pack 6, software mirroring, support for Virtual Server and VMware, and support for EMC and NetWare multipathing.
Hindsight is a great thing, by using it is not a great plan. We all apply service packs, patches and updates with great regularity and most of the time all is fine with the world. HOWEVER, if only life was always so simple we wouldn’t get so many support calls “I’ve just done this and lost all my data, can you help recovery the system/get my data back/or whatever”. Often we can help, but it can be a lot of hassle, lots of down time, lots of annoyed users and expense.
Before you do anything to a system or storage, take an image and make sure you have a current backup. You know it makes sense ;-))
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We have several virtualisation host servers here in the office, XEN and VMware being the main two. As we do considerable testing, rebuilds, etc. We often move the virtual machines about between host servers. Typically we will move between ESX servers.
Recently we needed to move a virtual test server (VM) from a XEN host server, and decided to move it across to VMware ESX 3 (VI3) server we knew was under utilised.
We decided to use the VMware Converter software tool to do this and what follows is a brief description of how it went.
VMware Converter comes in two formats, as a bootable CD or as a Windows executable. The bootable CD allows you to move a machine without making any changes to system, whilst the EXE version requires you to install the software within the Windows on the VM first.
We went with the EXE version, mainly for convenience, after clicking the install exe the software installs like any other Windows application.
You then start the installed converter software with a double-click.
Click the IMPORT MACHINE button to start the wizard.
You’ll be prompted for the source type (local machine) and login (again local). Choose the drives you’d like to take with you.
Next, you choose your destination. This is either to ESX direct, or in our case the VMC server. At this stage we had to select the cluster, ESX host server and finally the datastore, where you’d like the VMDK etc. to reside.
You then need to select which network interfaces within VMware you want to associate with the NICs on the machine you are importing/converting/migrating.
Finally, decide it you want to install the VMware tools. We said yes to this, which is important later on, see gotcha 2.
VMware Converter now starts working, creating a VM on the ESX server and importing the machine. This took 10m 59s in our case, but admittedly it was pretty simple Windows 2003 server with only one Java application installed.
Once this process is complete you’ll be asked if you want to start the VM. I said no, shutdown the original server VM on the Xen server and then started the new VM on the ESX server.
Here is the first “Gotcha”. Our original server was a W2K3 server on a Xen host. Why does this matter, because the server defaulted to booting in “PV-ENABLED” mode. Which dies on ESX, this is because “PV-ENABLED” mode uses XEN drivers, etc. to support hardware based virtualisation using VT chips and the like, which are not supported in VMware obviously.
So we needed to manually select the non “PV-ENABLED” mode via the VMware console.
Gotcha 2 is that we told VMware converter to install the VMware tools into the new VM, which requires a reboot. So we had just managed to login and were working towards changing the boot options and the server restarted.
Once we rebooted (manually choosing non “PV-ENABLED” mode again) we logged in and changed the boot options by right clicking on the machine, choosing properties, clicking advanced, then settings under Startup & Recovery.
Change the default operating system away from the entry with “PV-ENABLED” in it. Click OK a couple of times and it’s done.
Pretty painless really.
References:
Editing boot.ini Windows 2003
VMware Converter
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We've written about power consumption of servers in the past and it is increasingly important issue both here in the UK and in the USA.
Treehugger.com recently reported on the report by Jonathan Koomey of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. To quote their piece they say:
In the last five years US servers burned through 5 million kw of power – that’s the equivalent of five 1GW power plants, or more than “the total possible output from the Chernobyl plant” when it was working.
arstechnica cover the same report and also comment on how the US Environmental Protection Agency will soon begin a six-month study of power consumption in the data center.
It is increasingly clear that managing the power consumption of your enterprise is going to have to be on the IT department agenda.
Technologies such as Virtualisation from Xen, VMware, etc. will decrease the numbers of servers, whilst Cassatt Collage will help power down servers that are not needed based on the current load (and bring them back online when load increases of course).
WAFS can further assist the situation, by decreasing the number of servers and storage required in your branch offices.
Increasingly, "Carbon Footprint" is an issue that both public and private organisations must look at seriously. It will have a big impact on your business and of course on the environment.
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What’s the fuss about hosted IM (Instant Messenger)? The more we look at it the more sense it makes. The trouble with running any of the standard corporate products, such as Live Communication Server or Sametime is getting beyond the firewall in a secure way, meeting compliance requirements through recording and traceability and integrating with other systems.
The hosted solution is as secure as you like, meets all normal compliance requirements and integrates very well. Best of all, it is low hassle. There is no need to rip your infrastructure apart to get it installed and working. So it doesn’t turn into a major project.
The research is compelling:
IM is the killer Convergence application…
• 81% of corporations said their employees are more productive with IM
• 19% said that collaboration had increased.
Source: INT Media Research
• Email traffic reduces by 67%
• Voicemail reduces by 83%
• Fax reduces by 43%
Source: Oestermann Research
European IT Directors Survey:
• 81% know key advantages of IM
• Significant Business Cost Reduction
• Performance Enhancement
However:
• 77% concerned over Security threats of Public IM
• 75% see as network threat
• 68% worried about data loss
• 60% have no idea how to deliver secure IM
• 87% have no corporate guidelines on IM
The hosted solution brings all the benefits without all the problems.
The integration is really neat, integrate with telephony, for an extended “user presence” facility – the contact is at their desk, but on the phone; or whatever. Integrates with LCS, Sametime etc – so you don’t need to trash what you already have.
Not only can you IM to a text SMS on a mobile phone, the SMS can also reply to your IM. How cool is that????
You get the idea, this is powerful stuff and its easy as you don’t have to run the infrastructure.
...read more
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Latency slows file transfers and SQL transactions if run over the WAN, in this entry we talk about the testing we have been doing that identifies the sorts of improvements in application performance you can see with WAFS and specifically with TCP Acceleration.
We have blogged more than once about Packeteer’s iShared WAFS (Wide Area File Services) technology when referring to sharing documents over the Wide Area Network (WAN). Typically we refer to our testing of transferring Word, Excel, PDFs, images, etc.
However, that is only part of the equation when it comes to iShared.
TCP Acceleration is a relatively new feature in the iShared arsenal, but the performance improvements can be considerable. Take a look at the chart below.
What the chart shows is the time it took for an identical Microsoft SQL transaction to complete. When running native over the local area network (LAN), it took about two seconds, over the WAN about two minutes on a link with a 20ms ping time. Almost three minutes at 150ms.
Then with iShared configured the numbers drop to only five and a half seconds at 20ms and almost eight seconds at 150ms. So rather than wait two minutes for your list of orders, you wait 5-8 seconds!
In our test environment, we had the iShared remote appliance configured in an “inline” configuration, so the client PC was routing all traffic via the iShared device. Preferably, you would use WCCP to do this as it is a more sensible approach as it builds in a better redundancy than the inline approach.
Obviously, the figures above are from a test environment, with no other traffic on the (simulated) WAN link, so your “mileage will vary”. Software versions, WAN configurations, etc all have an impact. We should also point out that the SQL query we were using was rather simplistic and contained considerable repetition (which we then repeated over and over), so works in the favour of the iShared TCP acceleration algorithms.
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