MSI 880GM MainBoard... Oops: E41

I bought a box of computer guts from Newegg, to upgrade my Linux virtualization host. This box has not been doing anything recently, because it was still running Fedora 8. I know F8 is soooo old, but the machine is only a PIII with 512Mb. Since it didn't have VMX or SVM, old school Xen was all it could run.

That board was an Asus, and it had served me well, as have several other Asus boards. My Citrix XenServer machine is running on a Foxconn mainboard and my VMware ESX is running on HP board (because VMware will not lower themselves to run on anything but name brand hardware.) This time around I selected an MSI 880GM-E41.

My plan was to run RHEL 6 for a few weeks to look at the changes to their virtualization stack, then move to either SL60, Citrix XenServer, or VMware. To determine my options, I attempted an install of each. Of course VMware threw up all over the box, but I expected that.

What happened next scared me: Citrix XenServer refused to load, since the machine had no network port. No need to panic. I tried Red Hat 6, which installed, but didn't recognize the onboard port.

Uh oh... Bad board? That means pulling out all the guts and spending more money to send the thing in for a replacement. Maybe I should check the Google Interwebs to see if this is a known issue.

And it is. The 880GM-E41 has an Atheros AR8131M, which is not "fully" supported by Linux. If I had gone $5 more to the 880GM-E43, I would have gotten a Realtek 8111DL, but I didn't check the drivers first. The really fun part is that if I'd gone $5 less to the 760GM-E51, I would have only lost the ability to overclock the memory. For some reason Newegg's site only displays the 760GM-E51 when you specifically search for MSI boards. (It must be a special order.)
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So what do we do? Turns out, Red Hat's Anaconda installer does not recognize the Atheros NIC, but the Red Hat kernel does. Once the install was finished, I was able to manually configure the interface. At the first boot, udev had seen the card, and installed the driver, but was not able to active it without an ifcfg-eth0 file.

I've got a couple hours left, tonight. I'll either try to hack Citrix Xenserver to recognize the NIC, or mess around on I Can Has Cheeseburger.

Windows P2V Failures

First, the bad news: I have made several attempts at doing a Windows P2V, and they have all failed. Last night's attempt with the Citrix XenConvert software was no better... Except it lead me to realize why my attempts were all dismal failures.

Before we get to the the why, let me point out that Citrix XenConvert is one seriously cool tool. More on the later.

Now, the good news: All my P2V attempts have grabbed the drive from the Windows system (all have been XP), and written the content to the VMs drive. I can mount the drive and see the NTFS partition. When I boot the VM, they uniformly refuse to load.

And the problem is... All my Windows systems are dual boot. This means that when the P2V software packages the physical machine, it grabs the MBR and the NTFS, but misses the /boot partition. Without /boot, it can't get the grub.conf to realize that it doesn't need /boot.

The solution should be fdisk /mbr, but in order for that to work, you needed the Administrator password to the physical system. (Notice we are talking about the Administrative account, not an account with admin access.) Unfortunately, Compaq and HP obscure the account on their pre-installed systems. Oops.

In order to test that the problem is grub related, I plan to recover one of the systems to factory defaults, try the converter, then reinstall Linux.

ESXi Clone Without vCenter

Tossed together a little script to clone VMs on an ESXi that is not vCenter managed. Rather than paste the whole thing into the blog, I've posted it over on the site:

http://dougbunger.com/scripts/esxiClone

Once the script executes, access the ESXi via vClient, and choose the Configuration tab. Select Storage, browse the share, navigate to the vmx file and Add to Inventory.

Finally: VMware for Executives

Executive: I'm not satisfied with performance.
IT Puppet: With VMware, computers work better, and save money.

Too bad most of the information is only marginally accurate, but what do you expect when your primary data source is a sock puppet.

EULA_AGREED=yes

For contractual reasons, I can't tell you what that means. I did the hard work and figured out the hack. Now you get to figure out how to implement it.

VMware S2 Console Under Linux

I really don't like the Web UI on the VMware Server 2. What I really don't like is how poorly console access works from a Linux machine. What complicates matters further, is that the server is hosted on Linux! Luckily, the VM's can be made to use VNC... Just like KVM and Xen! Yeah.

To the VMX file add:

RemoteDisplay.vnc.enabled = "TRUE"
RemoteDisplay.vnc.port = "5910"

This will cause the console to listen as VNC connection 10.
(That's 5910 - 5900. Getit?)

Now issue:

vncviewer localhost:10 > /dev/null 2>&1 %

Now we have a detached viewer, with no need to launch a browser.

In my opinion, this product just transitioned from useless to viable.

Virtualization Round-up

Over the course of the last year, I've done allot of experimenting with virtual system platforms. I think I've decided the best direction for my efforts. These observations are driven by two factors: ease of set up and capacity for remote administration.

OpenVZ
I've done business with two Virtual Private Server (VPS) services, which were oddly named VPSland and VPSlink. I actually ditched VPSland because the provided CentOS, which was highly unstable. (Yes, yes, yes... I've heard all your arguments before: "CentOS is just RedHat". I've worked with RedHat for almost ten years: You're wrong.) What we really want to talk about is OpenVZ at VPSlink.

The OpenVZ platform does not offer VMs a swap file. This means that each VM needs access to large amounts of physical RAM. Given that disk is cheaper than RAM, this significantly limits VM density on the host. In my case, I could not even run RPM commands unless I had 256MB of RAM. Once I converted to Xen, everything ran on 64MB.

Vmware Server 2 Beta
Wow, was I disappointed in this product. All management is done via a web interface that is slow, clunky, and optimized for Windows desktop use. As a result, it posed several challenges. First, it required a 12meg browser plugin. Unfortunately, if I wasn't on the LAN, the plugin would time out.

The next problem was getting all the pieces needed for the install. Vmware provided an RPM, but no indication as to the dependencies for the RPM. Once the RPM was installed, it turns out there are additional, unchecked dependencies. The good news, however, was that all the hardware was recognized. Speaking of recognized hardware...

Vmware ESXi 3.5
Vmware recently announced they were dropping the license requirements for the ESXi server in the standalone mode. This created allot of excitement. I downloaded the ISO and quickly discovered that only "select SATA controllers" are supported. Not mine.

With no hardware to run it, ESXi was less than exciting.

Vmware VI3 ESX+VC
By far, the VI3 product set is the hands down winner... If you have $15,000 to spend. My budget is in the $150 range.

Xen
I'm sorry to say, Linux para-virtualization with full-virt support takes wins. Easy to deploy, remote console available via X11, command line and GUI support. Text based Linux installation is available within an unmodified SSH session. About my only downside is that the memory allocation is not as dynamic as I'd like.

Bottom Line
Is it any surprise the Linux guy didn't test Microsoft? No, not really. Is it a surprise the RHCE guy picked the platform included with Fedora? Maybe-- but in the end, it was stability and ease of access that won the day.

Vmware: Reconcile Inventory with Disk

Interesting problem: As we know Linux / Unix don't like file names with spaces. The Vmware GSX, Server 2 Bate, and ESX have a Linux command line, but can support spaces in virtual machine names. This makes it difficult to reconcile VMs in the inventory against those on the storage.

Here's a one-line to handle it:

find -name *.vmx | 's/ /\\ /g' |
  xargs grep -i "display"

Output will show directory path, configuration filename, and inventory name for all VMs. If executed from /vmfs/volumes, it will span shared storage as well.

Vmware Server 2 Beta

Ran into an interesting problem attemptting to install Vmware Server 2 Beta. I've been working almost exclusively with ESX for the last few months and decided to replace my Xen system with the free Vmare product. My motivation was to experiment with the user interface.

The RPM imploded during the first install. I guessed the download was corrupted. I downloaded the file a second time, but it refused to try a second install. Since it was not in the RPM database, I knew it had to be some file system droppings.

First, I cleared some files from /usr/bin:

rm -rf /usr/bin/vm*

That didn't work, so the next step was to nuke the application directory:

rm -rf /etc/vmware/*

That got it. The RPM is installed. Now we have to figure out how to use it.