VM Squad

The team over at bluebear just released an update to their very cool management app called Kodiak. Myself and others have blogged about it before and have overall been impressed with the direction they are headed.

I think the biggest thing that I noticed first is that they have created an option to bypass the SSL stack in windows so you can finally skip the infinite SSL verification bug found in earlier versions.

Also their password vault also peaked my interest, I haven’t had a chance to install it yet but i’m wondering if it works with the guest OS also since their goal is an “IT IDE”.

Their download page still shows 0 invites available but leave a comment and I’ll start handing them out as soon as they refill them.

Kodiak 0.0.3 Release Notes

Download or register for the best program

For a few weeks now I’ve had both of the ESX hosts in my main cluster display not responding in VC. I’ve tried reconnecting them but this only solves the problem for a minute or two. Restarting the VC service will fix this for 10-15 minutes but it still falls back to “not responding”.

VMware has a checklist of stuff to check when an ESX host displays “not responding”

VMware Checklist

I made it down to number 8 before the problem seems to have finally been fixed. Time will tell as always.

VMware KB#1003490 “Restarting the Management agents on an ESX Server”

I know it’s been blogged about before, but I needed the location for the sysprep files today and found a nice list of download links and locations of where the contents need to go.

Sysprep files and locations

CharlesTwin from the Petri.co.il Forums has started a thread about two applications he wrote to help gain knowledge about VMware ESX 3.5. He requests that you simply email him with some info about your knowledge about VMware and your quest to learn more and he’ll email the applications to you. He’s already responded to my request for the apps so hopefully i’ll get them soon so I can write an article about them.

For more information check out his thread over at the Petri forums. Click Here

Parallels must be feeling the holiday spirit these days. I noticed on SlickDeals.net this afternoon a posting about Parallels Workstation being given away. Simply register, download the installer for your OS and check your email for the activation key. I love these free giveaways companies do, it really gets their product into peoples hands who may not have tried their software otherwise.

Link for registeration

I love FastSCP, it was one of the first tools that I used when I started working with ESX. So of course I was excited to see that on Dec 22nd they are giving away a free christmas present to anyone that registers.

Rich from vmetc.com has a sneak peak on his website. Click here to read his post and click here to go register for it at Veeam’s website.

VMware has offically release Workstation 6.5. I love their Workstation product and use it just about every day for testing and to run my Ubuntu VM at work.

VMware Workstation 6.5 is packed with new features, including:

• “Unity” view provides a seamless desktop experience.
• DirectX 9.0c with Shader Model 2 graphics enable Windows 3D applications and games.
• Easy Install simplifies the creation of Windows and Linux virtual machines.
• Powerful Record and Replay for groundbreaking debugging capabilities

Check the new product page to learn more, VMware Workstation 6.5

Well like most of us I’ve attempted to install Kodiak onto my Windows desktop at work. Upon logging in i’m flooding with certificate trust popups that will never stop. Very frustrating for sure but this is an AIR bug so don’t get pissed at BlueBear for it. A few have mentioned this isn’t an issue on Linux but I don’t feel like running a VM just yet only to test this software.

Well I checked their support page today and they had posted an update to their workaround instructions. I didn’t want to rename the VC server so I just added a dns entry for “VMware” into DNS as an A record and once it started resolving i just typed VMware as the server name in Kodiak and continued to login as normally. Tada!

Thanks BlueBear for the update on this very annoying AIR bug, greatly appreciated!

Well it’s good to see active development from the Kodiak team. They released version 0.0.2 today but I still can’t get around the trust issues that they’ve even posted a work around for. I still have some invites left so if you need one just post a comment and i’ll try to get them out as soon as I can.

Duncan from Yellow-Bricks.com posted a great review here of version 0.0.1 if you’d like to catch up on the hype.

Taken from their release notes:

New functionality:
We have added support for configuring existing virtual machines. All the expected functions are available. Configuration for a Virtual Machine is accessible via the configure button attached to a given VM object on the screen (Inspector Panels / Map)

Configuration of all standard resources is available, e.g. Memory Size, CPU allocation/shares, virtual disks, virtual NICs, and removable devices.

Usage Notes

1. Virtual disks are of the “preallocated/thick” type, support for all disk types will be available in the next release.
2. ‘Host-device-backed’ virtual devices (e.g. floppy/cdrom/raw) are not supported, but will be available in a future release.
3. ‘Remote-backed’ virtual devices (e.g. floppy/cdrom/ISO images on the client) are not supported, but will be available in a future release.
4. VMs must be powered off for configuration. While it is possible to reconfigure a running VM, it may result in a host fault that will cause your changes to be discarded.
5. If you make changes to a VM that you don’t want to commit, simply close the configure window and the changes will be discarded, (or hit the discard button).
6. Support for VM Creation will be available in the next release.

Known Issues

• Untrusted certificates on windows may cause an authorization dialog to continually appear. The certificate must be added to the local store, please see this page for a work-around.

• License keycodes are case sensitive, please ensure you enter them exactly.

• VirtualCenter is not yet fully supported. While it might work, functionality is not guaranteed to give predictable results. We are currently adapting Kodiak’s back-end data model to more effectively handle VirtualCenter’s data structures.

So a month at the new day job and I’m tasked with getting a new Cisco ASA 5510 configured and ready to install at our DR site. Last thing I worked on with Cisco was an old 1700 router so not exactly the same but oh well. We already have one 5510 installed at our main office, copied the config, updated the boot and asdm images and ready to go. Changed the IP addresses for the new router before putting on the network and tested to make sure everything came up correctly on reload and it did. Hooray for me, always nice to have something actually work when you have no experience with it.

Our DR hardware consists of an IBM x3650 server with dual quads and 32GB of ram and one LeftHand storage module that has a total of 1.6TB of storage I think. We’ve had this equipment installed and running here at our main location for a few months and one of my tasks when I started this new job was to get this DR equipment actually installed at the DR site. So yesterday the boss and I took a road trip with the equipment up to the DR site. We have a 100mbit link TLAN link from Cox between our HQ and DR sites so replication is not an issue. The only major issue we had setting everything up was actually getting the link to come up between the two sites. It had been installed for three months, we were getting a link up there but Cox said they couldn’t see anything at our HQ location. Upon getting back to the office, noticed that the cable was unplugged. Yea it kind of helps when things are actually plugged in but lesson learned.

So now I get to continue planning for a failover test later this month to show the people who sign our checks that yes, this money actually did buy something useful.

Kodiak, the only product I’ve found to promise VMware ESX management on Linux has released their private beta. I can not wait to test this out soon. To sign up for their private beta visit their website, click here. This will be getting installed on the laptop tonight so I hit the ground running early next week.

On the job front I’ve verbally accepted a position with a local company here in Oklahoma City that has a small VMware deployment, so hopefully i’ll start signing paperwork tomorrow to concrete the deal. This is a major change of pace from over 100 physical servers to less then 15 but they are wanting to concentrate on growing their VMware footprint along with growing the IT department in both size and capabilities so this will hopefully be a great place to both learn more and do great things with my skill set.

I’m not a fan of using beta software for production purposes. But I decided to try and use Ubuntu 8.04 LTS with the latest beta from VMWare. Installation went fine and most of the virtual machines I installed ran without problems. I then got a request for a 32-bit Vista VM to consolidate some older DUD’s (Dressed Up Desktops) that were being used for automation processes. Installation went smooth as expected. Got it logged in and joined to our AD domain without a hitch. Turned off all pretty effects to speed it up a bit. Installed SNMP and IIS and handed it over to the user. I come back this morning and he’s telling me it’s down. I boot it up and it goes through some type of registery check. It configures some updates and logs in finally. I goto check that snmp is still enabled and it’s complaining about low resources. Reboot and the same thing. Google doesn’t turn up anything usefull so i’m assuming either the developer installed something wacky or the VM got corrupted yet again. I had a similiar thing happen the first time i tried Vista on Server 2.0 Beta on this server.

So I’ve gone back to Server 1.0.6 after fighting through dependency hell. Fingers crossed that I can finally get this user up and running so I can eliminate more of these damned DUD’s.