http://vmxbandits.com/ 27th August, 2008 08:55 AM - VMware have just announce that VMware Workstation 6.5 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is now available. You can download this Release Candidate by visiting the Workstation 6.5 Beta Program page and be one of the first to try out this Release Candidate. Improvements since Beta 2 include performance enhancements for Record/Replay and numerous bug fixes. http://vmxbandits.com/index.php?blog=34 20th August, 2008 08:40 AM - VMware have updated their VMware Server 2.0 product to RC2 and with this release comes a number of changes. Such as:- Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS):  Properly backup the state of the Windows virtual machines when using the snapshot feature to maintain data integrity of the applications running inside the virtual machine. Virtual Machine Communication Interface (VMCI): Support for fast and efficient communication between a virtual machine and the host operating system and between two or more virtual machines on the same host. Support for SCSI pass-through (generic) devices: Allows for SCSI devices such as tape backup devices to be connected to virtual machines. Expand disk capacity on the fly: Allows for adding new SCSI hard disks and controllers to a running virtual machine. Firefox 3 as a supported browser for the management interface. Remote Client Devices: Access devices such as CD-ROMs that are not physically connected to the host via VMware Remote Console Click here for the full story. http://vmxbandits.com/index.php?blog=33 13th August, 2008 08:12 AM - Seems after Australia went to bed and the rest of the world started waking up to the Aug 12 nightmare that is vmware's licensing bug the vmware communities thread about the issue went from 4 pages to over 40. Anyway, news is VMware has a KB article about the problem which includes patches and other info: kb2.vmware.com/kb/1006716.html I was most amused to read that the patch required a reboot. They must have realised this was going to be a problem, so they helpfully added some advice "...VMotion off running VMs, apply the patches and VMotion the VMs back." So that's all I need to do to get VMotion working again, is it? :) http://vmxbandits.com/index.php?blog=32 12th August, 2008 12:53 PM - As a fun aside to my last post which details our struggles with the ESX3.5u2 August 12 2008 'Licensing Bug', it's nice to note that the Infrastructure Client that comes with this build (which reports itself as Version 2.5.0 Build 103672) started crashing on my machine and basically left me unable to connect to VirtualCenter. Skipping the war story, turns out the VMware Update Manager Extension plugin, version 1.0, causes VMware Infrastructure Client to bomb out at startup or after clicking on a VM or two (usually within 10 seconds of startup) with the following error: EventType clr20r3, P1 vpxclient.exe, P2 2.5.0.2, P3 487533aa, P4 mscorlib, P5 2.0.0.0, P6 471ebc5b, P7 3404, P8 21c, P9 system.io.ioexception, P10 NIL. The solution is of course to uninstall the above plugin (you need to go through Add/Remove programs, since you can't even start IC). Two for two - seems someone at VMware screwed up royally on their quality control on this release... http://vmxbandits.com/index.php?blog=30 12th August, 2008 01:16 AM - Yay, some new information popping up at the VMware Communities site that seems to indicate people following the instructions for the workaround (ie, setting the date back to Aug 10) are finding their guest OS's dates set backwards as well, in spite of the fact that (a) they've turned off all the time sync options, and (b) the product documentationapparently states and/or communication with vmware indicated that ESX won't try and sync times ~backwards~, only forwards. As an aside, it occurred to me when I was reading everyone move past the constructive debugging into the whinging phase of the thread asking when this might be fixed that we've already been given a clue as to a likely timeline: note we were asked to set our clocks back TWO days.... http://vmxbandits.com/index.php?blog=31 11th August, 2008 10:24 AM - Welcome to the 12th of August 2008. Please set your clocks back two days. http://vmxbandits.com/index.php?blog=29 6th August, 2008 11:43 AM - So this is pretty old news now (~1 mth?), but it may as well be said - there's an update to the SVMotion GUI plugin provided by the vip-svmotion.wiki.sourceforge.net/project guys - I can't see any real difference with it to be honest, but presumably it's better in some abstract way. Or something. Also, a newly installedesx3.5 server I connected to today asked me.. well actually held a gun to my head and forced me to download a new VI client. So far I can't really see any difference with this either, though perhaps it now lets ESX see LUNs that are formatted with bad ju-ju without taking down the whole ESX host. In any event, there is one aspect of it that's slightly worse. Nothing major, except it crashes and burns when I try and connect to VI with it. So not critical or anything. http://vmxbandits.com/index.php?blog=28 8th July, 2008 09:34 AM - "By default with VMware Server 2.0 Beta, debugging mode is enabled for all hosted virtual machines. This has been the case with every VMware beta product that I can remember. The problem with debugging mode is that it significantly slows down the performance of all on-board virtual machines so much as to make them unusable." Head on over to Realtime Community for the answers. http://vmxbandits.com/index.php?blog=27 20th June, 2008 03:24 AM - "VMware Storage VMotion is a state-of-the-art solution that enables you to perform live migration of virtual machine disk files across heterogeneous storage arrays with complete transaction integrity and no interruption in service for critical applications." Sounds a lot like VMotion itself, which lets you migrate live VMs around between hosts in your pool or recover transparently from host failures, except it's not quite what you might think at first. DRS balances your guests around to better utilise resources, and HA lets you recover quickly on a host failure. There's no equivalent of either for storage, and Storage VMotion doesn't do anytihng like failure recovery at the storage level, which kind of sucks. You are expected to manage your own storage redundancy, and this ends up costing usually a lot more than the rest of the system if you do it to the same level of redundancy and performance. I had a rather large post ready which explained about how fiberchannel is too expensive, iSCSI corrupts data and is slow, and NFS is hard to configure for redundancy (and lets not even get into how annoying it is that ZFS as the backend FS for NFS makes VMware guest performance just plain suck to the point of unresponsiveness) but it's all rather pointless really. The problem is that storage is the base resource that everything else hangs off, so if the storage array goes away, everything falls over. This isn't an easy problem to solve either. I guess VMWare could write to two or more storage arrays (perhaps you could add them to the pool like you do ESX hosts) and simply revert to using a subset of them in the event of a failure. Sort of like an application layer n-way mirror. There's some specifics to work out, but I can't see how it'd make it much slower than the slowest store in the pool (hell, for reads it'd have to increase performance, you'd think!) It'd have to be cheaper to buy a couple of NFS boxes attached to some RAID storage than buy a SAN. So storage VMotion just lets you manually move storage around to perform maintenance on the backend storage etc (which is definitely a good thing, don't get me wrong) but doesn't really help when it comes to a storage version of the standard vmotion/HA. Oh, and the lack of a GUI on Storage VMotion is IMHO inexcusable. Seriously VMware, what the hell. http://vmxbandits.com/index.php?blog=26 18th June, 2008 02:41 AM - "Tom Valovic over at Virtualization Review magazine pens an interesting (albeit short) comment about VMware's current positioning and how it resembles that of previous notorious companies like WordPerfect Banyan, and DEC." Check out this article over at Realtime Windows Server. http://vmxbandits.com/index.php?blog=25 12th June, 2008 01:38 AM - More security issues to report, a vulnerability was reported in VMware in the VIX Application Programming Interface (API). This meant a local user could obtain elevated privileges on the target system. VMware ESX also has the same fate with it's vulnerability. An issue was reported with VMware on Linux-based hosted systems and VMware Tools, where a local user could obtain elevated privileges on the Windows-based target guest operating systems. Time to get patching ... but from what I hear, ESX isn't the easiest thing to patch -- VMware should really address this. http://vmxbandits.com/index.php?blog=24 2nd June, 2008 06:15 AM - SecurityTracker has reported that there is "a vulnerability in VMware Workstation, VMware Player, and VMware ACE which can trigger a flaw in the Virtual Machine Communication Interface (VMCI) code to execute arbitrary code on the target system." and "a local user can trigger a heap overflow in the shared folders feature of the VMware Host Guest File System (HGFS) to execute arbitrary code on the target system." Hopefully, we'll see some updates to these products soon. http://vmxbandits.com/index.php?blog=13 6th May, 2008 04:59 AM - Currently, my Windows 2008 Test Server is now in a stuck state and everytime I try to start it, I get "Insufficient resources to satisfy configured failover level for HA." Unfortunately, the guy who looks after our SANs is at an OpenBSD hackathon in Japan - so this will have to wait until he comes back. No Server 2008 for me, it would seem. It does seem strange that I can't do anything with this VM now. I can't even export it and say bring it up on a standalone Virtual Server or Workstation instance. http://vmxbandits.com/index.php?blog=9 21st April, 2008 05:32 PM - The Brian Madden web site is hosting a presentation from BriForum in Amsterdam (October 2007) where Ron Oglesby presents a head-to-head comparison between VMware ESX and Citrix XenSource. Click here for the video. http://vmxbandits.com/index.php?blog=8 29th March, 2008 02:22 AM - "This newest beta version offers the capabilities from before, plus an array of new features, increased performance and stability—including a broader range of guest operating system support, direct access to virtual machine consoles, an intuitive Web-based management interface, and increased memory for greater scalability." Click here to get your hands on it. http://vmxbandits.com/index.php?blog=7 27th March, 2008 04:28 PM - Having used older versions of VMware's products, when it came to the latest version of ESX Server, I noticed that the boot screen appears and disappears in a split second, making it next to impossible to access it. Thankfully, you can edit your VMX file and add the following to make it behave. bios.bootDelay = "5000" OR bios.forceSetupOnce = "TRUE" to enable the BIOS setup on next boot. http://vmxbandits.com/index.php?blog=6 24th March, 2008 12:00 AM - Thanks to the good folks at SecurityTracker, we were let know about some critical issues with VMware products. Such as:- VMware Virtual Machine Communication Interface - Memory Corruption Flaw Lets Local Users Deny Service VMware Unspecified DHCP Bug Lets Users Deny Service VMware VMX Configuration File Access Controls - Lets Local Users Gain Elevated Privileges VMware Windows Hosted Systems Named Pipe Bugs Let - Local Users Gain Elevated Privileges For more information, click here. http://vmxbandits.com/index.php?blog=5 20th March, 2008 04:15 PM - When asked by dlg about the performance of the virtual servers I had setup, I was said I wasn't that impressed and I had wished it to be more responsive. That's when he said to try RDP instead, as it's much quicker and it certainly is. From RDP, the machine feels no different to a physical server. Cool eh ? http://vmxbandits.com/index.php?blog=2 19th March, 2008 08:13 AM - Today, we ventured into the realm of VMs, setting up a couple of Windows 2003 R2 Servers on 2 separate Storage Groups on ESX Server. I didn't have any success installing VirtualCenter Server, so I did everything via VMware Infrastructure Client instead. http://vmxbandits.com/index.php?blog=1