Virtual Lab Manager

Users are so much fun...

We asked users to review their templates inside of our LabManager and remove any templates that were no longer needed.  This is the reply we get back from one user.

The 12GB I am currently using for my 2 templates has a street value of just under $1.  (1TB drives are now under $80) Throw in a fancy RAID and this might  go to $3."

You know I didn't know that...  How about I throw your running VM's on that $80 1TB drive?

VMware ESX PSOD and VMLogix LabManager

Over the past couple of months we have had problems with our ESX server popping with a PSOD.  Every time we would look at the dump file all we could find is that the system lost heartbeat and went PSOD on us.

I came across this VMware KB article that talked about the vmksummary file. It showed that just before each PSOD the swap memory was exhausted.  I started tracking this file and watching for high swap usage on our hosts.  Finally, I came across a server with high swap usage and found the culprit.

VMLogix LabManager 3.7.0 and below uses a host agent on the ESX server.  The agent is written in python and normally works flawlessly except for this little problem.  Trying to ID the problem on the server I looked at the memory usage.

# ps -eo comm,rss --sort rss

...

vpxa                 38724

webAccess       66076

vmware-hostd     68092

python2.2          310101

python2.2          311201

This showed me the top memory users to by python.  I then took a look at ps

# ps -ef | grep python

....

user    2701       1  0  Sep07 ?       00:00:00 python2.2  esx_service.pyc

user    2869  2701  0  Sep07 ?       00:00:00 python2.2  esx_service.pyc

I located the esx_service.pyc inside the install directory for the VMLogix agent, so I tried to restart the agent via the web gui interface.  The service stopped and restarted by these two guys still hung around.  I stopped the VMLogix guest agent then killed the remaining processes.  Once I did this my swap memory was freed.  I then restarted the VMLogix agent.

Version: VMLogix 3.7.0

Version: VMware ESX 3.5 Update 4

This will not be a problem in VMLogix 3.8.1 + using vCenter mode

Virtualbox vm conversion to VMware vm

I came across some Virtualbox VM's that I need to convert to VMware Workstation.

Using Virtualbox version 3.2.4 I documented the details about each VM.

• Operating System and Architecture (x32, x64)
• # of CPUs
• Amount of memory
• etc...

Next I converted the vm.vdi disk file to a vmware disk file.

• Open a cmd prompt
• d:\vb\vboxmanage clonehd c:\source\location\win7x64.vdi c:\destinaion\location\win7x64.vmdk --format VMDK

Once the clone/conversion completes you can open VMware workstation and create a new VM. Enter the details for the OS, CPU, Memory you collected above and then choose existing disk and point to your new .vmdk files.  Once you bring up your image you will want to install the VMware tools and remove the Virtualbox tools.

I tried several other variations to convert them over but found the above process to be the easist method.

Others tried:

• VMware converter - Worked well for Windows images but linux images had some problems
• Virtualbox Export to OVF - Had several problems with the disk being in a read-only mode.  I tried several diffent suggetions but never got it to work.
• qemu-img.exe - but I ran into file size limitations. You can recompile in cygwin but no Thank you.

Windows 7 Activation - 0x8004FE30

I was attempting to activate a Windows 7 pro install using the command line and kept getting "Windows non-core edition" with error code Ox2a 0x8004FE30.  Several searches for this error code never turned up anything special.  Finally located a document that let me know my version of Windows 7 had a retail key associated with it.  To change this I had to use this TechNet document.

The following is what I used and from the TechNet Document.

Converting Retail Editions to Volume Activation

Retail editions of Windows 7 Professional and Windows Server 2008 R2 can be converted to KMS clients, provided that the organization has acquired the appropriate volume licenses and conforms to the Product Use Rights. To convert Windows 7 Professional and all editions of Windows Server 2008 R2 from retail to a KMS client, skip the Product Key page during operating system installation. When installation is complete, open an elevated Command Prompt window and type:

Slmgr.vbs /ipk <SetupKey>

where SetupKey is the KMS client setup key from Table 4 that corresponds to the edition of Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2.

Table 4   KMS Client Setup Keys

VMware Converter won't import - Failed to open file

For a couple of days we have been trying to track down a problem we were having with a single ESX server.  We couldn't import anything via VMware's plugin in vCenter. 

Messages we recieved in vCenter's Tasks:

• Failed to open file
• Unkown error returned by vCenter Converter Agent

Errors we received in converter's log files:

• 554 PROXY service vpxa-nfc not found
• Task failed: P2VError FILE_OPEN_FAILED
• Failed to open 'vpxa-nfc://

Finally tracked it down after googling 554 PROXY service vpxa-nfc not found.  It led to this VMware KB article.

Basically we were missing two lines in /etc/vmware/config

authd.proxy.vpxa-nfc = "vmware-vpxa:vpxa-nfc"
authd.proxy.vpxa-nfcssl = "vmware-vpxa:vpxa-nfcssl"

After editing the file and placing these lines in you will need to restart mgmt-vmware and vmware-vpxa

[root@server]# service mgmt-vmware restart
Stopping VMware ESX Server Management services:
VMware ESX Server Host Agent Watchdog [ OK ]
VMware ESX Server Host Agent [ OK ]
Starting VMware ESX Server Management services:
VMware ESX Server Host Agent (background) [ OK ]
Availability report startup (background) [ OK ]
[root@server]# service vmware-vpxa restart
Stopping vmware-vpxa: [ OK ]
Starting vmware-vpxa: [ OK ]
[root@server]#

Hope this helps you out.  It took me a while to locate the problem.