… go with me here.

You are going to have black caviar (highly recommended). You were provided with 50 grams; you figure you can fit at most 45 grams onto the piece of that delicious dark-rye. So what do you do? Do you disregard and thus throwout the 5 grams? … Well it’s not important what YOU would do, its important what VMware does!

Mr. ESX tends to look at the excruciatingly expensive, sustenance-providing caviar, and throws out the majority that it can’t handle, and opts for the remains in the hard-to-reach crevices of the jar.

What does this all mean for the geek?

There’s a decrepit limit of 2TB minus 512 bytes for each LUN that you can present to ESX. Anything larger, it has no love for. So if you were to present it with a 4TB LUN, you would naïvely assume that you would get the bastardised version of 2TB and the rest would be lost in the ether. I guess that would be somewhat logical.

Lets try it:

Capacity vs. Available Space

There you have it. Instead of actually using up as much as ESX’ly possible (~2TB) from a LUN that has been allocated, VMware chose to only pick up the left-overs (~500GB).

If you’re ever in a situation where you’ve moved the vCenter database, and have actually changed the login details for the database that the DSN points to, and you’re using SQL Server. Then upon re-installing vCenter, you will be greeted with:

“Database job [Past day stats rollupvcenter] was created by another user. Please use the same user to setup your DSN or remove the job. ODBC Error: [Microsoft][SQL Native Client][SQL Server]The specified @job_name (‘Past Day stats rollupvcenter’) does not exist.

When vCenter is first installed, it schedules jobs with the help of the system DB – MSDB. What’s left to do, is just remove the jobs created by the previous dbo of your vCenter data. You achieve this by first listing what jobs are created on the SQL Server.


SELECT [job_id],
[originating_server_id],
[name],
[enabled],
[description],
[start_step_id],
[category_id],
[owner_sid],
[notify_level_eventlog],
[notify_level_email],
[notify_level_netsend],
[notify_level_page],
[notify_email_operator_id],
[notify_netsend_operator_id],
[notify_page_operator_id],
[delete_level],
[date_created],
[date_modified],
[version_number]
FROM [msdb].[dbo].[sysjobs]


As you can see, four scheduled operations exist. Thankfully you don’t have to worry about just clearing this table, as there’s a stored procedure that comes within MSDB -> sp_delete_job

Run it for each of the jobs, and you’ll be ready to continue installing vCenter.

In the unfortunate scenario that the machine you use to run your vSphere client ever crashes (unfortunately VMware doesn’t make an OSX Client), you may wish to start up the client, and click the performance tab. You may be greeted with the following when selecting the “Performance” tab:

Unexpected end of file has occurred. The following elements are not closed

This is due to a file which hosts all the chart settings (an XML-based key value pair collection) becomes corrupt, and is actually cut off.

Its quite easily found at : c:\Documents and Settings\user_name\Application Data\VMware\server_name-charts.xml

From here, you have several choices:

• revert to a backup
• delete it
• clear it (just place <ChartSettings /> inside of it)

That’s all there is to it. Happy vSphere’ing

The logical progression of the thin-client cloud movement is that it comes to the masses. We’ve seen numerous advances in Virtualisation technology purchases from the Citrix mob with Xen, VMWare’s long pedigree, and the new entrant Sun’s VirtualBox. All these are great, but are missing the point of mainstream adoption outside the enterprise. This can only occur when virtualization is no longer about just server consolidation and cycle saving.

Apple is building a server-farm, can this be a prelude and foundation of what is to become the delivery mechanism for the VOS (Virtual OS) ? My prediction is that within 2 years, not only will there be a smaller device that you are able to take around in the form of a tablet, but more importantly is its integration with your persistent presence.

A simple scenario is you working on a document or watching a movie on your Mac at home, after which you must leave. Without turning anything off, you merely take your tablet/light-weight computing unit, and proceed on your trip. Once on a bus, you will be able to resume your document editing, movie watching experience exactly where you left off.

Current core strengths within Apple do not include OS abstraction and Virtualization (I’m not counting Rosetta, as that wasn’t developed inhouse), so Apple’s next purchase should be a player in Virtualization delivery, or at least see a partnership emerge – Citrix – wink*wink*nudge*

“FAILED: The object or item referred to could not be found” is the extremely helpful message that VMWare converter displays when it fails.

Digging deeper, within the logs we can see that there are multiple instances of

“Warning: failed to create directory” and “Warning: failed to clone directory tree”.

The simple work-around is to convert the vmdk disk to a monolithic-sparse.

You can do this by issuing:

$ vmware-vdiskmanager -r original.vmdk -t 0 destination.vmdk

This will clone the disk image as well as modify it from being composed of 2GB files for the entirety of your VM to a single vmdk referred to as a ‘monolithic-sparse’ (merely referring to the fact that it will increase in size automatically to encompass the the VM partition).

After completing the cloning process, you should have no problems in restarting the conversion process, and it should complete as advertised.

As with everything, it’s always about the amount of time and money you’re willing to put in, in order to get what you want.
I like music, and as someone that has a few computers around the house, coupled with a Vista Media Centre – I want to be able to have access to mood altering music throughout.

My music application of choice happens to be iTunes™. Understandably it isn’t everyone’s favourite, and I must admit – it does seem very sluggish on Windows™ compared to its OSX™ counterpart.

The point of this post is to setup streaming of music to iTunes™ utilising mt-daapd [aka Firefly], Ubuntu, VMWare and obviously the mp3’s themselves – hosted on a Windows™ share.

Many people will have a ’server’ of some sort, be it for the hundred of gigabytes of family photos and videos, a common repository for house mates to exchange files or simply in my case – all of the above.

I have a server that runs Windows™ 2003 Server. My laptop synchronizes with it every time I dock it, thus providing me with a cheap NAS-like solution for my photos, university lectures and assignments.

Also, since Internet radio is something else I like to dabble in, and my ISP providing me a nice list free from bandwidth charges – and ultimately wishing to purchase a Wi-Fi enabled radio streamer, I decided to enable streaming of music across my house.

You might be asking your self – why am I running a VMWare Server + Linux in order to just stream music held on a Windows™ share? Well there are alternatives, and apps such as Tangerine that will run quite happily on Windows™ itself and serve music – but I do not want to run anything that isn’t necessary on the server itself – I prefer to leave it to virtual machines, as it allows for a much quicker re-deployment, coupled with the fact that I need a few other services to run on the VM for the network.

So here’s a guide on how to get streaming mp3’s with the use of mt-daapd, linux and about 30 minutes of spare time.

I will use names for usernames and server configurations that I have used, change as needed.

On the Windows™ box:

• Create a username “buntu” [assign a password]
• Create a directory which will host the root of your music. So if it’s present in H:\Backup\Files\Personal\Music, then share and make sure you share Music, thus it will be accessible via \\quack\music [quack is the name of the server]
  • Make sure the security as well as the sharing settings allow for “buntu” to have ‘read-only’ access

1. Download + Install VMware Server
2. Download Ubuntu Desktop/Server [or a distro of your choice - I will only run through Ubuntu, as it's based on my farourite Debian, only prettier + more user friendly]
   • I recommend you download the *alternate* ISO, ubuntu-7.04-alternate-i386.iso as with VMWare server, you can get a “no screens found” error, and the alternate install will merely remove the GUI whilst installing Ubuntu.

If you’re creating the VM – 2 things.

1. When you’re going through the ‘New Virtual Machine Wizard’ – make sure you select “Use Bridge Networking”, as that way you’re making it easier for your new virtual machine to have access to the current network and thus the network shares on another computer.

   

2. Hard drive space allocation – if you’re going to be using this for something other than just streaming, and have other services in mind for this VM – such as perhaps a dedicated development environment, you might consider giving it more than the default 8Gb.

On with it.

Assign the ISO you download as the CD drive.

As I mentioned above,

Proceed through the menus and install Ubuntu, for most – just accept the defaults.

Optional:

In order to have the VM start when the host boots up, select the appropriate options after going to the VM Settings and under the Options tab – you will see – “Startup/Shutdown”, with the respective options being now open to you on the right hand side.

Then:

# apt-get install smbfs
# mkdir /music
# mount -t smbfs -o username=buntu //quack/music /music
# password:

• The above should go through, if you have all the permissions set up correctly.
• Now you have to make sure it is mounted on boot. Edit the /etc/fstab and append the following:

Please note the space between the source and the mount point

//quack/music /music cifs username=buntu,password=music,user 0 0

Then just a quick check:


# mount /music
# ls /music

Should return no errors, and you will now have /music mounted each boot.

Time to set up the streaming.


# apt-get install mt-daapd
# /etc/init.d/mt-daapd start


Now if you installed something with X, launch your browser of choice [firefox], and point to: http://localhost:3689 (Default username:password –> admin:mt-daapd)

or

alternatively modify the /etc/mt-daapd.conf manually

Here you are able to specify any parameters as well as monitor who’s leeching [scratch] listening to your music.

At the very least, I recommend you modify (under Configuration on the site):

• Server Name [as per the file itself - 'the stuff that comes up in iTunes']
• Admin password [used to log into the the site]
• Music Folder, set it to ‘/music’
• Hit ‘Save’

Now on the status page, hit ‘Start Scan’ – and you’ll see the little counter for ’served’ increase quite rapidly. Any iTunes™ instance on the network, will be able to see Quack under shared music.