Iām delivering a VMware View training this week. When I reached the āReplicate Serverā chapter we had to do a lab with the āHercules virtual applianceā. The goal of the lab is building a multiple āConnection Serverā environment and let the appliance do the load-balancing.Ā Although the āHercules virtual applianceā is well documented and even has a VA page at the VMware website, I had a hard time to get it working. The virtual appliances available on http://istanbul.sourceforge.net/ either have a IDE disk or an old SCSI disk which isnāt compatible with ESX 3.5. I converted the āHercules virtual applianceā to the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), and itās available for download at the following address :
http://www.ntpro.nl/software/Hercules-SCSI-ESX3.zip
Hereās the way to set it up:
ā¢Ā Import the OVF virtual aplience.
ā¢Ā Power-on the Hercules VM.
ā¢Ā Open a console. Login as a user-ID of "root" with a password of "root".
ā¢Ā Enter the following command at the command line:
ā¢Ā pen 443 10.168.100.3:443 10.168.100.4:443
The format of the command is: pen <port-number> <first-server:port> <second-server:port>. There is a space between the first port number and the first server IP. There is a second space between the first server's 443 port and the second server's IP.
It runs on a Linux OS built from scratch to have a minimal footprint. It can run with just 32MB memory for normal usage and you can increase memory requirements for the appliance as you need. It also has a built in web server, SSH server, DHCP client. You can administer the machine remotely via SSH. It is setup for DHCP so the networking is setup automatically. A webserver is installed to both serve up this page and to help you test different configurations. The load balancing functionality is provided by the excellent open source project pen.
The amount of disk space used by it is 4.0 MB. The virtual disk will expand as needed and has a maximum size of 100 MB. This is the minimum size of a virtual disk that can be created in VMware Workstation.Ā TheĀ compressed/zipped image of this appliance is 2.5 MB !
Wednesday, February 18. 2009
Hercules virtual appliance available in OVF
Tuesday, February 17. 2009
Support for ESXi and ESXi free in Veeam Backup 3.0
OpsCheck- a free tool to ensure vMotion operation
Server Virtualization Design Module for Lanamark Suite
The new module supports the following platforms: Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, Virtual Iron and VMware ESX. Here is whatās unique about the module:
It provides advanced modeling and side-by-side comparison for a broad set virtualization platforms. Unlike other solutions that focus only on servers and platforms, the module takes into account both technical and commercial dimensions of each solution:
- Hardware,Ā Servers ā new, redeployed and upgraded.Ā
- Storage arrays and HBAs since these components dramatically affect the TCO.
- Software licensing costs for virtualization platforms and management software.
- Services (e.g. training, consulting).
The module leverages a rich repository with servers, blade enclosures, storage arrays, HBAs and virtualization software maintained and constantly updated by Lanamark. Based on conversations with Lanamark's customers and partners, it became clear that calculating the number of servers required and balancing workloads across these servers is not enough. What is needed is the ability to design and compare end-to-end server virtualization solutions across virtualization platforms with hardware, software and service components.
Saturday, February 14. 2009
ESX Deployment Appliance (EDA) v0.87 released
Herco van BrugĀ released a new version of EDA,Ā an appliance dedicated to deploying ESX servers fast and easy. It has a scriptbuilder to quickly create %post-scripts.
New in 0.87:
- Editing the order of the scriptparts.
- Bulk creation and deletion of ESX hostnames/ip.
- A fs.php page that allows for small remote updates.
- ESXi support fixed again.
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/1216
To get started quickly, read the Quick setup guide on this site.
Friday, February 13. 2009
VMware vCenter Converter released
VMware vCenter Converter lets users quickly, easily and affordably convert Microsoft Windows and Linux based physical machines and third party image formats to VMware virtual machines. It also converts virtual machines between VMware platforms.
VMware vCenter Converter is available in two different versions ā Standalone Converter and Converter integrated with VMware vCenter Server.