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evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Sleepstupid posted:

I want to make another "instance" of that VM, is that possible? Can I just copy the one I already converted or do I have to re-convert the same laptop again (which took over 3 days)?

Sleepstupid posted:

OK, I found the Datastore browser, copied the existing files to a new folder, created a new VM and pointed it at the new folder. Now when I try to start the new VM I get a blue-screen during windows boot. Did I miss anything?

Thanks for all the help :)
Open the VM settings and double check all your settings. Also if it bluescreens chances are there's a dump to be examined somewhere.

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Sylink
Apr 17, 2004

Im thinking of beefing up my Desktop to do some home learning.

Is the main bottleneck for running VMs the hard drive speed?

I already have a nice quadcore CPU, but I'm loath to spend a lot on SSDs.

I just want to learn the ins/outs using ESXI and whatever, probably with virtualbox like in the OP.

Will I hate myself without them or would getting a couple more regular drives and tons of RAM be fine?

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

Sylink posted:

Im thinking of beefing up my Desktop to do some home learning.

Is the main bottleneck for running VMs the hard drive speed?

I already have a nice quadcore CPU, but I'm loath to spend a lot on SSDs.

I just want to learn the ins/outs using ESXI and whatever, probably with virtualbox like in the OP.

Will I hate myself without them or would getting a couple more regular drives and tons of RAM be fine?

You can get an SSD and have most your VM's and other VM's run flawlessly, thin provision your SSD's and you should be good. Just get an ample amount of ram, which is dirt cheap

zapateria
Feb 16, 2003

Wonder_Bread posted:


Using iperf between two of my VMs with VMXNET3 adapters gets me around 9Gb/s.

I have two 2008 R2 servers with VMXNET3. Iperf only gives me 628Mbits/sec, what am I doing wrong?

I checked that both VMs are running on the same ESX host.

vvv yeah same.. Also if I enable Jumbo Frames (9000) on both network cards, iperf shows 322Kbits/sec.
That was only a test though, I don't think I have Jumbo Frames enabled on the hosts.

zapateria fucked around with this message at 14:27 on Apr 20, 2012

complex
Sep 16, 2003

In the same port group / VLAN?

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Sylink posted:

Is the main bottleneck for running VMs the hard drive speed?
In a test env when you're rebooting/changing/copying/installing poo poo all the time you'll almost certainly be hitting I/O bottlenecks all the drat time. Even a single SSD solves that problem handily.

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast
Obviously the main bottleneck is RAM if you don't have enough. But once you have enough RAM, an SSD is definitely going to give it a huge boost.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

HalloKitty posted:

Obviously the main bottleneck is RAM if you don't have enough. But once you have enough RAM, an SSD is definitely going to give it a huge boost.
Keep in mind the cardinal rule that a ton of people forget -- operating systems will use spare RAM as disk cache. If you're being overly thrifty and giving your OS instances just enough memory to run their applications without swapping, you're going to be paying for it in I/O.

Less Fat Luke
May 23, 2003

Exciting Lemon
Okay, I swear that I hot-added memory to VMWare ESXi 4 machines before, but now I'm getting an error when trying it about my license not permitting it. I've never had a license other than the free one; was there some time limit that I wasn't aware of?

zapateria
Feb 16, 2003

zapateria posted:

I have two 2008 R2 servers with VMXNET3. Iperf only gives me 628Mbits/sec, what am I doing wrong?

I checked that both VMs are running on the same ESX host.

I tested another separate vCenter now, but with pretty much the same hardware and versions, and I get around 900Mbit/sec.

three
Aug 9, 2007

i fantasize about ndamukong suh licking my doodoo hole

Less Fat Luke posted:

Okay, I swear that I hot-added memory to VMWare ESXi 4 machines before, but now I'm getting an error when trying it about my license not permitting it. I've never had a license other than the free one; was there some time limit that I wasn't aware of?

Memory hot-add does not work in the free version (as far back as 2009, at least). It may have worked under a trial license?

Sylink
Apr 17, 2004

I know VMconverter lets you go physical to virtual, does it let you do the reverse as well?

I'm a retard/not too knowledgeable on it yet so this may be a stupid question.

DevNull
Apr 4, 2007

And sometimes is seen a strange spot in the sky
A human being that was given to fly

I heave heard that people use VMware for their virtualization, and then Citrix for the remoting instead of using View.

What is it that Citrix does better? How do they compare under low bandwidth connections?

Cidrick
Jun 10, 2001

Praise the siamese

Sylink posted:

I know VMconverter lets you go physical to virtual, does it let you do the reverse as well?

I'm a retard/not too knowledgeable on it yet so this may be a stupid question.

Not exactly. The process is called V2P, and vmware has a few docs on the subject. In short, the process entails taking your vmdk and using it to image a system, but, as you can imagine, taking a virtualized hardware configuration and unvirtualizing it can be... tricky.

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

Sylink posted:

I know VMconverter lets you go physical to virtual, does it let you do the reverse as well?

I'm a retard/not too knowledgeable on it yet so this may be a stupid question.

There is no good reason to do this (and it isn't as easy as P2V)

Less Fat Luke
May 23, 2003

Exciting Lemon

three posted:

Memory hot-add does not work in the free version (as far back as 2009, at least). It may have worked under a trial license?
gently caress, it probably worked under the trial.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Rhymenoserous posted:

There is no good reason to do this (and it isn't as easy as P2V)

Actually there are (placating support engineers who blame your running virtual for poo poo that's got nothing to do with it).

Calling back 45mn later with: "oh yeah and BTW this is on bare metal" is pretty hilarious.

three
Aug 9, 2007

i fantasize about ndamukong suh licking my doodoo hole

DevNull posted:

I heave heard that people use VMware for their virtualization, and then Citrix for the remoting instead of using View.

What is it that Citrix does better? How do they compare under low bandwidth connections?

The vast majority of IT professionals in the Desktop Virtualization realm are Citrix people due to VMware being new to the market and Citrix having massive market share there. That said, there are a few things Citrix does better, but it's not massive.

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

evil_bunnY posted:

Actually there are (placating support engineers who blame your running virtual for poo poo that's got nothing to do with it).

Calling back 45mn later with: "oh yeah and BTW this is on bare metal" is pretty hilarious.

I've had that discussion before, usually it ends up with me beating someone to death with their own error message. "No you calling a function that doesn't exist isn't a problem with virtualization idiot"

Cidrick
Jun 10, 2001

Praise the siamese

evil_bunnY posted:

Actually there are (placating support engineers who blame your running virtual for poo poo that's got nothing to do with it).

Calling back 45mn later with: "oh yeah and BTW this is on bare metal" is pretty hilarious.

VMWare would make a mint by adding a paid extension that completely hides all things VMWare from dmidecode, lspci, and the like, just from admins who want to prevent braindead developers from blaming their performance issues on the hypervisor.

"No way man, you're totally running on your own dedicated 12-core 48GB box, man. It's your code."

sanchez
Feb 26, 2003

Rhymenoserous posted:

I've had that discussion before, usually it ends up with me beating someone to death with their own error message. "No you calling a function that doesn't exist isn't a problem with virtualization idiot"

I hide the vmtools tray icon and lie through my teeth.

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer

Cidrick posted:

VMWare would make a mint by adding a paid extension that completely hides all things VMWare from dmidecode, lspci, and the like, just from admins who want to prevent braindead developers from blaming their performance issues on the hypervisor.

"No way man, you're totally running on your own dedicated 12-core 48GB box, man. It's your code."
The problem typically isn't virtualization, it's people with poo poo VMware environments that are terribly sized. By requiring bare metal, you can at least avoid that problem. We have many vendors that do not support running virtualized, and we just went ahead and did it anyway. We purchased 5x licenses of plate spin just in case.

Cidrick
Jun 10, 2001

Praise the siamese

adorai posted:

The problem typically isn't virtualization, it's people with poo poo VMware environments that are terribly sized. By requiring bare metal, you can at least avoid that problem. We have many vendors that do not support running virtualized, and we just went ahead and did it anyway. We purchased 5x licenses of plate spin just in case.

True. Plus, I'm not seriously saying the developers are always the ones at fault. However, I do run into the case a lot of times where a new project comes along and it sounds like a good fit for VMWare: low I/O and CPU requirements, just memory-hungry. But the the lead developer will flee at the first sight of a VMWare environment because they've had poor experiences with it in the past. My guess is that a lot of people have tried out virtualization on their own desktop, or used it back when the hypervisor ran on top of an OS and performance was not so good. Virtualization has come a long way; a properly-architected VM environment is really drat good.

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

Cidrick posted:

VMWare would make a mint by adding a paid extension that completely hides all things VMWare from dmidecode, lspci, and the like, just from admins who want to prevent braindead developers from blaming their performance issues on the hypervisor.

"No way man, you're totally running on your own dedicated 12-core 48GB box, man. It's your code."

OH hay it's like you've been on the conference calls with our BI vendor this week....

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug
Anyone else run Virtual AD instances to remote sites for clients? I am thinking about starting up cloud AD instances, my VCAP-DCA teacher really liked it a lot, just not sure how to market it.

Basically Clouded AD enviroments

Syano
Jul 13, 2005

Corvettefisher posted:

Anyone else run Virtual AD instances to remote sites for clients? I am thinking about starting up cloud AD instances, my VCAP-DCA teacher really liked it a lot, just not sure how to market it.

Basically Clouded AD enviroments

I did some work for an MSP that does this. I dont really know how to market it either to be honest. But it worked pretty nice. Our biggest implementation would be small businesses and 9 times out of 10 they would be existing customers. Basically the situation would be a business with an SBS server or real similar. Usually only 1 or 2ish onsite servers. We would spin up a virtual environment, DC, email and anything else they needed, go in and decommission all their onsite physical stuff and then open up vpns to our datacenter usually using redundant commodity internet then switch them over to monthly service billing.

stevewm
May 10, 2005
I have a few small servers at work I am looking at virtualizing using ESXi.. (whatever it is called these days)

My only problem is a shoe string budget.. I can't really buy anything additional at this point.

I have a older whitebox/supermicro server I think would be suitable. All the hardware is listed as compatible on the "Whitebox HCL". Specs:2.66Ghz Core 2 Duo, 6GB RAM,SuperMicro mobo w/ dual on-board Intel NICs, PCI-Ex 3Ware 9650 RAID card - 7 SATA discs attached.

I am looking at a Windows 2003 DC/DNS instance and 2 small linux instances (one very lightly loaded intranet web server and the other for a UniFi controller).


Would this hardware run that comfortably? And what about the RAID config.. I was thinking maybe 6 disks in RAID10, with the 7th as hot spare?

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

stevewm posted:

I have a few small servers at work I am looking at virtualizing using ESXi.. (whatever it is called these days)

My only problem is a shoe string budget.. I can't really buy anything additional at this point.

I have a older whitebox/supermicro server I think would be suitable. All the hardware is listed as compatible on the "Whitebox HCL". Specs:2.66Ghz Core 2 Duo, 6GB RAM,SuperMicro mobo w/ dual on-board Intel NICs, PCI-Ex 3Ware 9650 RAID card - 7 SATA discs attached.

I am looking at a Windows 2003 DC/DNS instance and 2 small linux instances (one very lightly loaded intranet web server and the other for a UniFi controller).


Would this hardware run that comfortably? And what about the RAID config.. I was thinking maybe 6 disks in RAID10, with the 7th as hot spare?
http://www.vmware.com/resources/com...L9wuXV7KHaEo3VA
The raid card doesn't seem to be on there for 5, you may need to use 4.1 ESXi or look into something else. Worst case is VMware won't install because it can't detect any storage. You might just want to go RAID 5 + 2 Hot Spares waiting if you can, unless you have some highly utilized SQL DBs

Wibla
Feb 16, 2011

This has instructions on getting the 9650 to work with 5.0 U1, it takes a little work, but is worth it.

I wouldn't recommend running raid10 or raid5 with hotspares, the 9650 supports raid6, and with write cache enabled (and BBU or UPS, preferably) it performs pretty well for being an "old" raid controller.

I would try to get more than 6 gigs of ram though, if at all possible.

stevewm
May 10, 2005

Wibla posted:

This has instructions on getting the 9650 to work with 5.0 U1, it takes a little work, but is worth it.

I wouldn't recommend running raid10 or raid5 with hotspares, the 9650 supports raid6, and with write cache enabled (and BBU or UPS, preferably) it performs pretty well for being an "old" raid controller.

I would try to get more than 6 gigs of ram though, if at all possible.


Awesome... thanks!

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

Wibla posted:

This has instructions on getting the 9650 to work with 5.0 U1, it takes a little work, but is worth it.

I wouldn't recommend running raid10 or raid5 with hotspares, the 9650 supports raid6, and with write cache enabled (and BBU or UPS, preferably) it performs pretty well for being an "old" raid controller.

I would try to get more than 6 gigs of ram though, if at all possible.

Oh it has a decent sized write cache, okay then yeah raid 6 is a good option.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT
Strange issue I am seeing, anyone care to share some insight?

vMotion between these two hosts used to work (to my knowledge). There are identical units (Dell R610). Both have Intel E5620 cpus. Verified VT settings are the same. Already tried powering down a VM, resetting all CPUID mask settings to default. No go.

Both hosts are currently running ESX 4.1.0 433742

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





Shot in the dark, do they both have the same Hyperthreading settings enabled/disabled in BIOS?

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Are the host bits identical (on the vMotion source)?

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT
Both have HT enabled.

How would I determine if the host bits are identical (google isn't helping me today)?

Edit: I see no difference.

Moey fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Apr 26, 2012

Cthulhuite
Mar 22, 2007

Shwmae!
Not sure if this is the right place, but I couldn't find a dedicated Citrix thread;

I'm trying to setup the Citrix Receiver on my local machine to look for more than one Endpoint, or to attempt a connection on multiple Endpoints. Right now, we have an issue with outages on one ISP, and I want for the Citrix Receiver to see that it can't access that specific server and try another instead.

Is there any way to do this? I've done some research and looked into some registry settings, but none of them suit my needs.

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





Cthulhuite posted:

Not sure if this is the right place, but I couldn't find a dedicated Citrix thread;

I'm trying to setup the Citrix Receiver on my local machine to look for more than one Endpoint, or to attempt a connection on multiple Endpoints. Right now, we have an issue with outages on one ISP, and I want for the Citrix Receiver to see that it can't access that specific server and try another instead.

Is there any way to do this? I've done some research and looked into some registry settings, but none of them suit my needs.

This is a bit beyond my knowledge and something that has changed a lot over the years, but I don't think you want to be doing this on the local side. The Citrix Receiver shouldn't be looking at a specific XenApp server. It would be looking at a specific CAG / WI. Do you administer this Citrix farm or are you a user?

Cthulhuite
Mar 22, 2007

Shwmae!

Internet Explorer posted:

This is a bit beyond my knowledge and something that has changed a lot over the years, but I don't think you want to be doing this on the local side. The Citrix Receiver shouldn't be looking at a specific XenApp server. It would be looking at a specific CAG / WI. Do you administer this Citrix farm or are you a user?

It's my Farm, but I came into it long after it was all setup, and it currently points to a specific XA server. I suggested setting up a CAG, but my boss doesn't want to spend the time rejigging the whole system, and wants a local 'patch' to make it work.

If there's no way to do it, though, I can push for a better CAG\WI setup and see where I get.

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





The proper way to do it is with a CAG/WI. If it is all local or over a VPN / private WAN you can get away with just the WI. What would happen in this instance is the session would go down if XA01 went down, but would then reconnect a new session to XA02.

What version of XenApp are you running? There is an older version of the "Citrix Receiver" called XenAppHosted or any of the older versions that contained Program Neighborhood that would do what you want. If you can't find a version of the older client with Custom ICA Connections allowed, let me know and I can get it to you.

But yeah, a WI isn't "rejigging the whole system" and is the better long term solution.

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Noghri_ViR
Oct 19, 2001

Your party has died.
Please press [ENTER] to continue to the
Las Vegas Bowl
So I'm basically in support hell right now. I've got VMware saying I'm having a Netapp problem and Netapp saying I have a VMWare problem. ARGH!!!!!! So what's happening is that for some reason my NSF shares seem to disappear for a bit. For example:


Is what happended last night. Now this only started happening after I upgraded to 5.0, everything was running perfectly on 4.1. VMware's first response was to webex in, take a look and immediately assign blame on Netapp and said I had to open a trouble ticket up with them. I just shrugged and did as I was told.

Netapp was much more thorough and mead me generate an autosupport and we went through the log files. We didn't find any network disconnect and nothing to indicate that the the shares were being shut down.

Next we created a new NFS share on the other interface and moved some of the more heavy I/O intensive VM's over there and surprise surprise I didn't have any lost connections with that share. After running a few other support tools I was passed back off to VMware.

Now my VMware support person is trying to blame the network despite my monitoring tools showing no downtime and the log files from our procurve showing nothing to indicate there is a problem. Has anyone had a problem like this since upgrading to 5.0? Anyone have any ideas?

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