Obviously, a standard workflow or process for private vCloud Infrastructure is the next thing that everyone should have it. Just recently I have had implemented it for one of my customer and ONLY then I realized that how important this is for you to drive your IT Service process in professional way and meet compliance standard. I have never thought before that the whole request process for vCloud resources can be simplified dramatically. Imagine the whole automation request for vCloud resources starting from service request, approval and automation can be made by end-user through interactive self-service portal provided by Service Manager. This will indeed can help us to increase IT productivity, reduce costs and follow the best practice.

Although at this moment, there is ONLY vSphere integration pack currently available for Orchestrator Runbook 2012, but still you can create a simple custom activities by using a combination of Batch, Powershell & Powercli scripts for your Cloud resources operation. Once you have this baseline runbook, then at anytime you can enhance it to become more complex runbook such as by adding email notification once request is made and approved.

All the status of the activities then can be reviewed by end-user as well from the moment that the service request is being submitted and till completed. Believe it or not, it will just take a moment to complete the whole process and holla, your vApp is ready.

ariyossss

athlon_crazy

As per my collegue, you can P2V Redhat 6.3 via converter standalone 5.0.1 and the process is very akin to what we did to Centos 6 before. However, my colleague has told me that the conversion finally had stopped at 99% with error message “RHEL version not supported by reconfig” and further check with VMware KB we’ve found out here that this Redhat 6 is currently not supported by converter 5.0.x. We tried to reboot the VM and although it managed to boot up halfway, it will stuck at the well known check point with next error message (Kernel Panic), but at least we know that the grub is working as expected.

I believe this is not the end of the world and in order to solve the issue, I’ve asked my colleague to bring back the image so that I can fix it. Before that, make sure your Redhat 6 VM is using at least LSI Logic SAS or else, it will not able to detect the disk. Next, reboot your VM with Redhat Rescue disk, make sure the image is mounted at /mnt/sysimage and chroot, remake initrd so that mptscsih driver can be injected into new initrd, remove unnecessary LV parameter from grub.conf and then modify fstab file accordingly. Finally, reboot the VM and holla, your Redhat 6.3 is should be ready.

ariyossss

athlon_crazy

In year 2009, I did tried to do my first V2P for SLES 9 virtual machines by using “partition image” and Yast repair. Although the migration had completed successfully but the overall process was quite messy. Time has moved on and now there are so many tools available in the market which can also do the same things but with less headache. Platespin and Acronis for example has gained tremendous popularity for its capability of doing V2P migration to a dissimilar hardware. But let alone those two and let see how I did V2P migration for Windows Server 2008 R2 VM (ESXi 4.1) to HP Proliant MicroServer using Dell Appassure.

Setup:

• Source - Windows Server 2008 R2(VM), 2x vCPU, 2GB ram, 20GB vdisk
• Target - HP Proliant Microserver(Physical) 8GB ram, 149GB x2 HDD (no raid)
• Tool - Dell Appassure 5.3.1(VM)
• Speed - 1GbE

The overall process can be summarized as below:

• Dell Appassure Core Installation (Server)
• Agent Installation (Client)
• Machine Protection
• Initiate Backup (Base Image)
• Bootable CD
• Roollback
• Bring up the machine Read more
  No comments

Everyone should know what would such SSO is very important for vCenter 5.1 installation. It’s a main requirement for vSphere Web Client and there is absolutely no way that we can by pass it. However, I don’t have any intention to discuss on how to install SSO since the process is rather straight forward and you can search it on the internet. I’m more interested to share on what to do next once you finished installing your vCenter in your environment so that you can manage it through vSphere Web Client.

First, we must verify that your vCenter successfully registered in the vSphere Web Client through Lookup Service or else, you won’t see it under your inventory pane. Before that, please add vCenter local administrator to this SSO administrator group. Read more

Below is how to install VMware Tools for Centos 6.3 via CLi:

• #uname -r and copy the result
• #yum install gcc
• #yum install kernel-devel-$uname-r (i.e yum install kernel-devel-2.6.32-279.el6.x86_64)
• Initiate VMware Tools Install from VM Console
• Extract VMwareTools-8.4.2-261024.tar.gz
• #cd /../vmware-tools-distrib
• #./vmware-install.pl and choose all “Yes”

Once completed test your VMware tools:

[root@centos6 vmware-tools-distrib]# vmware-toolbox-cmd device list
serial0: Enabled
sound: Enabled
Ethernet0: Enabled
floppy0: Disabled
ide1:0: Enabled

p/s: C header should under “/lib/modules/2.6.32-279.el6.x86_64/build/include/”

ariyossss

athlon_crazy

Someone has asked me about a physical to virtual conversion for Centos 6.3 with LVM2-2.0.22-95 version. Frankly, I would rather choose Acronis than make a changes on the source server. But as we know, Acronis require a two stages of migration which sometime very time consuming. First we backup the source server and then we restore it to the destination server. Nevertheless, if you still want to migrate your Centos 6.3 via Converter Standalone 5.0.1, please read the rest.

Yes, it is possible to P2V Centos 6.3 via Converter Standalone 5.0.1 but like what we did for Ubuntu 12.10, we need to downgrade the default LVM2 in Centos to some old version first. There are two challenges here:

1. There is no #yum downgrade for LVM2 older than 2.022.95
2. Compatible LVM2 version for Centos 6.3

To be honest, I’ve been trying to get the correct version for almost 3 hours. Although I managed to installed some other packages but the converter still unable to see the LVM with error “fake-disk-from-vg”. But my second and final test finally able to get the LVM volume visible in the converter. So, if you still want to downgrade it, please make sure you follow below steps in the correct order.

Steps:

• Download and upload to your Centos LVM2-2.022.88 here,
• List LVM installed packages #rpm -qa | grep lvm2
• Remove LVM2 package #yum remove lvm2-2.0.22.95….
• Remove LVM2 lib package #yum remove lvm2-libs……
• Install the package #yum install lvm2-2.0.22.88….
• Start the Conversion

p/s: Make sure you don’t reboot the system without LVM installed
ariyossss

Thanks

I did successfully migrated a physical Windows Server 2012 today to VM via Converter Standalone 5.0.1. The process was really straight forward. Just install the converter onto your Windows Server 2012 and initiate the conversion.

While for FreeBSD 6, I’d used Acronis True Image Home 2012 and backup it as .tib image to ftp server. Then restore the image to my new created VM as per described here. Lastly, boot the VM with any FreeBSD livefs .iso, and modify your new device in /etc/fstab.

ariossss

athlon_crazy