Dev Team Assemble

So a little while ago I was playing around with building a virtual environment using Windows 2008 Hyper-V and while this was an interesting experience I found Microsoft's lack of any Linux distro support beyond the SUSE to be a bit of a pain.  That being said I wanted to increase the resources available on my Dell PowerEdge server and thought I would take this opportunity to rebuld it before I get started on building out a SharePoint 2010 beta 2 testing farm....whew, try saying that 10 times fast

I downloaded and installed the new VMWare ESXi 4.  It looks like they are really streamlining this technology with the vSphere platform...blah blah blah means they are the same product with license key feature unlocks (from what I understand of it anyways).  Not surprisingly this was a lightning fast install.  I did have a couple of hiccups trying to figure out a) where to put my free license key in and b) getting SSH enabled.

License Key - like most normal people I thought that after installing the vsphere client onto my desktop that there would be a little section in the help menu for adding license keys (like most software).  Turns out you need to click on the host, then the configuration tab and then the Licensed Features option under Software. (OK ... umm forgot to mention...click the edit button on the right hand side!!)

SSH - enabling this took some digging.  Not much mind you because there are actual quite a few people out there writing about the same thing...  here are a couple that I found:

• http://itsupportjournal.com/2008/06/30/remote-shell-access-in-esxi/
• http://blog.bruteforcetech.com/index.php/archives/126

I don't want to rehash it but here are the steps (in case they take down their postings!)

1. At the ESXi console ALT+F1 for new session at the console screen
2. enter the command "unsupported" and type your password
3. use vi to edit the inetd.conf file so type...vi /etc/inetd.conf
4. scroll to the areas where ssh is listed and remove the # sign (delete key works!)
5. type :wq to exit vi and save your changes
6. restart the server OR do the killing of the process number for inetd and using the correct switches (i just rebooted because I dont care that much

And after the machine comes back up you should be able to connect via Putty or whatever tool you are using no problem.

Technorati Tags: ESXi 4, virtualization, VMWare

Recently I acquired some server class hardware (Dell PowerEdge 2950)  and I thought, hey this is a great opportunity for me to setup a virtual environment at home so I can test out some beta products and do some tinkering with Linux. I have VMWare Workstation installed inside of Windows Vista machine at home and I have ubuntu 8.10 running in it and this seems to work ok but I have come across some issues with it that annoy me.

I was undecided on whether to install VMWare ESXi or Windows 2008 Hyper-V server. Based on the title of this article you can probably guess which route I took. I didn't decide to do this simply because I think Microsoft's virtualization platform is superior...I chose it simply because I use VMWare ESXi and ESX at work and was interested in seeing the capabilities of this free product in comparison.

After configuring the server with RAID 0 (faster and this is test) I popped the disk in and started installing. Truth be told the installation was a breeze...so much so in fact that I started the install, watched a soccer game and when I came back it was ready for me to login. I was a little confiused at first because at no point did I provide a username and password for the admin account but it prompted me at the login screen. Didn't take long to figure out it was Administrator/-blank- to login.

This all seemed a little too good to be true and I quickly found out that it was...after downloading and installing the Hyper-V Manager MMC into my vista machine I found I could not connect to the server. found this odd as the very purpose of this server is too allow connections. Turns out there were a few steps I had to do:

1. I had to add my user account (the vista one) to the server in order to pass my creds through.  I believe that once you have connected to it you can turn this off via the Hyper-V settings panel.
2. I had to turn off the server's firewall (I know, I know this is a bad thing but its a test box that will never see the outside world so...).  You can use the following command netsh firewall set opmode disable
3. I was able to connect to the server...BUT when I tried to create a machine I would get an error about Access Denied.  So I added myself to the Administrators group on the server.  At this point I can now use MMC to do most admin work on the server from my Vista client
4. I then started getting the following when trying to connect: Hyper-V Access Denied. Unable to establish communication between ‘SERVER’ and ‘CLIENT’ .  Funny thing is it would let me create a virtual machine but I could never seem to connect to it.  This one was quite confusing so I turned to my trusty friend Google to help me resolve this...I came across a blog post of one Adrian Dimcev here and it had the solution I was looking for.   Word for word heres the instructions from his site:
   • Click Start, Run, type DCOMCNFG. Click OK.
   • Expand Component Services, expand Computers. Right-click on My Computer and click on Properties.
   • Click on COM Security.
   • In the Access Permission area, click Edit Limits.
   • Select ANONYMOUS LOGON in the Group or User Name area. Then set the Permissions for ANONYMOUS LOGON to Allow for Remote Access.
5. After the previous breakthrough I got the following error (oh joy)  : The application encountered an error when attempting to change the state of the 'machinename'.  The hypervisor is not running....WHAT????? Ummmm yes it is......
   Ok turns out there is a very good reason for this as explained here in this Microsoft article.  All I had to do here was enable hardware-assisted virtualization in the BIOS.  After doing that it I was able to create my first machine in this environment == Ubuntu 9.

After reading a little further on the internet it seems that my setup at home (using a workgroup) is not the best way to do this and is partly to blame for some of mine and other peoples issues.  All in all the installation was a success but seems a little more confusing than installing ESXi.  Either way my environment is up and running.

Technorati Tags: hyper-v, Linux, server, virtualization, Windows