NetworkSydney

Hi All,

The Microsoft way to P2V a machine is by using Microsoft SCVMM. System Center Virtual Machine Manager has the ability to do online and offline P2V’s using clever boot.ini file modifications. So far both methods work well for me, however, in the field you see a lot of physical servers with over allocated disk space on both boot and data drives/volumes. Since we are all for saving money with virtualisation and that virtualisation offers us greater flexibility, why not reclaim that space and use it for other purposes.

The problem I’ve come across is that you’re not able to reduce the size of the disk when performing a P2V conversion with Microsoft VMM, or any other tool so far for that matter. You can increase the size but can’t decrease. I think this is a huge pitfall for Microsoft if you compare with VMware Converter. After doing some research (googling) I that the following is one way of shrinking the disks. Also note that we are reducing the size of the Windows volume within the VHD and the size of the VHD as well which is different to the compacting option. The compacting option will regain blank space in an ‘inflated’ dynamic disk;

1. Use diskpart and the shrink command to shrink the last partition on the disk. You can also use shrink querymax to determine how much it can be shrinked.
2. Use the vhdresizer tool to reduce the size of the vhd.

Note: the shrink command can only shrink upto a certain point, at which point an event is logged in the Application Log described which file is can’t be moved. Sometimes files such as system restore or indexing service may be the owner of these files. Disable such services may get you around diskpart not being able to move these files

If you need to configure timeout settings for your XP desktops in a VDI solution when using Citrix XenDesktop, take a look at the artice CTX117446 at the Citrix website. This article lists the registry entries that need to be modified to enable and set the Idle timer and disconnected idle timer. Unfortunately there is not ICA connection properties similar to Presentation Server configurations. These registry settings can then be transformed into a ADM file and deployed via group policy.

Spent some time today researching how privilege delegation works with Hyper-V and particularly with VMM 2008 R2. It seems to be quite inflexible and limited in that there is only one additional role that you can configure and that is the Self service role. There is also a ”delegated administrator” role however this is the same as a normal administrator except you can limit it to a host group, which is essentially a host container. The problem with the delegated administrator role still is that it still allows for the user to manage network, storage and everything else along with the virtual machine.

There is also Authorization Manager or AzMan, which is has been around since Windows 2003 SP1. The AzMan framework is there to provide a role based security model that can be leveraged by your application. Without going into too much detail you can create roles and define its’ tasks and assign it a scope so that the application will check and ultimately allow the user to perform the associated tasks he/she needs to do. I will try to explain a little more about AzMan and how it works with Hyper-V virtual machines as it does allow you to set per-vm privileges (something easily done in VMware Virtual Center) in the future. But for now I really do give VMM a thumbs down for privilege delegation. And if the industry wants to go completely virtual then we are going to have to break down the roles.

This is probably quite old but nevertheless it bugged me for about 15 minutes. If you get the error Access is Denied during the P2V conversion process when using SCVMM, and the target is a Windows XP machine; remember to turn off “Simple folder and file sharing” under the folder view options menu. I didn’t realise that this option prevents remote WMI access as well. It seems whilst this setting is enabled you will not be able to remotely map a drive or run the wbemtest tool.

Ok, it finally worked! I really like the offline P2V process VMM 2008 uses. It is based on WinPE, similar to the way SMS used to rebuild machines, and forced the target to boot into WinPE then streams the disk contents to Hyper-V. Although I initially had a lot of issues, I finally managed to get around them.

One in particular was the “Class not registered” error message (0×80040154) received when trying to perform an offline P2V of a Windows 2000 target. The target was a plain Windows 2000 Server with SP4 installed (slipstreamed). After hours of troubleshooting, it came down to requiring post SP4 updates. I am not sure which update in particular because it worked after installing the Unofficial SP5 for Windows 2000 Server.

The second issue was related to the offline P2V target booting up into WinPE, having its IP set automatically, able to ping itself however cannot ping anything else on the same subnet. In fact, one bizarre thing was it could only ping the gateway. It seems there is a hotfix released for this version, KB959596. This seems to apply to at least VMM R1, not sure about R2 as I haven’t tested.

Well its now a couple of weeks into the project and I am still sifting through the truckloads of servers. As I drill down into the servers to validate virtualisation capability it seems they (the servers) are dropping off one by one. So far the biggest parameter which is causing the candidates to be excluded is the lack of peripheral device support on the Hyper-V hypervisor, specifically tape drives. It seems Microsoft is at the VMware 2.5 level when it comes to tape devices attached to virtual machines. USB devices are also out of the picture, I would have thought this at least would have been supported. Actually on that note it seems raw device mappings seen in the VMware space are almost non-existent and instead I am being told that iSCSI or NPIV must be used. I will have to clarify this point as it is still a little hazy.

It seems VMware ESX 3.x does not support virtual IDE hard drives. So when converting physical machines or workstation images that are configured with IDE hard drives you may be greeted with a 0×07B blue screen. There is a fair bit of material out there, but I thought it might be valuable to provide my perspective as well.

Simply put, I replaced the atapi,sys file with the symmpi.sys file found on another virtual machine. Once this was done I was able to boot into the operating system in this case Windows 2003. Windows then automatically reconfigured itself and requested to reboot. After rebooting, I noticed the CD Rom drive was not configured, then I realised why the atapi.sys file had to be put back. Replacing the atapi.sys file with the original file followed by rebooting allowed me to see the CD Rom drive. I was then able to install vmware tools.

Note: although I downloaded vmscsi.sys and installed it, I am not sure that it was required. This file can be found in the vmscsi floppy image obtainable from VMware.

After doing some research and actual testing I have found that Windows 2003 will automatically change the HAL when upgrading a uniprocessor HAL with a single processor to a multi processor system. The HAL will automatically be changed to a multiprocessor HAL. However when going back, that is from a multiprocessor HAL and Multi processor system to a single processor system, the HAL will stay the same as a multiprocessor HAL. What looks like to be the best practice here is to update the driver for the computer device under device manager to a Uniprocessor driver by selecting it from the list of available and supported drivers.

Sometimes I think the hardest part about IT is understanding product Licensing. In this case I am talking about Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Initially I had the understanding that of Microsoft SQL Server was not cost effective on a virtual machine with Per Processor licensing. This is no longer the case as I recently reviewed Microsoft Licensing documents to state otherwise. The key point I took out of the document was that Microsoft SQL Server licensing was no different between virtual or physical environments. This now increases the use case scenario to host any database that does not require more than 4 VCPU’s (VMware Hypervisor). My understanding, is that Microsoft will allow you to assign as many virtual CPU’s as the number of cores on a single socket.

Once I dig out the document link I will post it.

Update: link to multicore licensing article http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/highlights/multicore.mspx

Just a reminder to myself I guess, that everytime you delete or change the Service Console interface the VMware ESX host (in this case 3.0.3) seems to lose its default gateway. You can simply re-add it by using the following command at the command line.

“route add default gw x.x.x.x” –> Where x.x.x.x is the IP address of the Gateway.