Saturday, March 31, 2012

Veeam One Free Edition

Veeam One Free Edition is awesome.  Or at least the installer is awesome.  I keeps telling me I have to reboot to complete the install, which I do.  I've done this 5 times.  It's great.  I keep having to reboot and then the installer runs and tells me I have to reboot again.  I wonder what else it does.  I will never know.  Too bad.

VMTurbo Community Edition on the other hand installed as an OVF.  But, apparently it wants to talk to a vCenter server, and not an ESXi host.  Argh!

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Windows 8

Installed Windows 8 Consumer Preview by following the VM setup guidlines at http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2006859.  Complete snooze, everything just worked, no issues (once I had ESXi at the latest level).

Turned on Remote Desktop via http://blogs.technet.com/b/digital_musketeer/archive/2011/09/14/how-to-enable-remote-desktop-on-the-windows-8-ctp.aspx.  Run CMD.exe and SystemPropertiesRemote.exe to turn on.


Tech Gripe

Grrr.  Stupid Sony DCR-HC30.  I had 3 tapes left to convert and now it's decided it can't do DV Out, only DV In.  DOH! DOH! DOH!!

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Patching ESXi

Now that I have a shiny new VM host, decided to try some stuff out.

Windows 8 consumer preview.  Started the install and got a dreaded "Hal_Initialization_Failed".  After googling around and getting nonsense (seriously, it only works as a VM on a windows 8 host?!), found a VMware post (http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2006859) saying to upgrade to the latest level of ESXi.  But I just downloaded it last week!  Evidently they don't rebuild the installer each time so upgrades are in order.  Upgrading is easier said than done.

If you've paid for vSphere, there's a nice management interface for this.  With plain old ESXi hosts, you have to do things the old fashioned way.  I guess that makes sense and they only want the cool tools in their paid product.  It's a big jarring when the trending of software (I'm looking at you Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird) is to have the app be self aware of new versions and have it update itself.

Here's a post explaining how to do ESXi updates - http://communities.vmware.com/people/vmroyale/blog/2011/09/15/updating-esxi-5--single-use-esxcli-how-to


  • Download VMware vSphere Command-Line interface (CLI).  It's free.
  • Install, and hey, you get ActivePerl.  I already have a perl, but whatever.
  • Next, go to http://www.vmware.com/patchmgr/download.portal and download the latest patch (hint, it's first in the list).
  • Upload it, via vSphere Client, to your favorite datastore.
  • Set your ESXi host to be in maintenance mode (the VMware KB on upgrading tells you how to query the patch to determine if it requires maintenance mode).
  • Use esxcli to see existing system patch levels:  "esxcli --server=[your ESXi host] --username=root software vib list
  • Use esxcli to install the updates: "esxcli --server=[your ESXi host] --username=root software vib update --depot=/vmfs/volumes/[datastore]/[path]/update-from-esxi5.0-5.0_update01.zip"    (your patch file may be newer)
  • Wait 5 minutes until it's done then reboot the host.
Done, worked nicely.  Since the vSphere API is all open source, it should be straightforward to put together software that issues these commands for you to allow you to upgrade from a GUI.  Another project for another day.

 So I continued the Windows 8 install.  No more "Hal_initialization_Failed" error and the install progresses.  Unfortunately I get an error later.  After saying "Preparing" for a little while I get "The computer restarted unexpectedly or encountered an unexpected error.  Windows installation cannot proceed.  To install Windows, click OK to restart the computer, and then restart the installation".  DOH!  Next post on installing Windows 8.

ESXi

Putting together an ESXi box out of some spare parts.

ASROCK Extreme3 Gen3 Motherboard
Core i7 2600 (supports VT-d, newer CPUs 2600K and 2700K do not)

Onboard VGA and nic supported by ESXi 5 right out of the box!

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Future Shock

Worried about our declining resources, and the sorry state of the world?  Then you're really going to need to see this TED talk.

http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_diamandis_abundance_is_our_future.html