It has been a while since I wrote my last post. About a half year ago I started with a new education where I put a lot of time and effort in.
For a while I followed the progress of the Blogging blogclient since the release of version 1.0. I tried it out but my blogstyle (wordpress) in the post preview was terrible. Now with version 1.0.1 my blogstyle is perfectly loaded, and this is the first post a made with Blogilo. I hope to found more time to blog regularly again in the near future.
For about three weeks ago I was asked by my colleague Eric Scholten for helping him out with his VMware View project for our company. I thought this is my change to explorer the in en –outs of VMware View. The infrastructure under VMware View was already build by Eric on four Dell servers and a Dell Equalogic SAN. After one week figuring out the architecture and everything up and on it, Eric told me he had to leave for a project right away. A lot of trust in my hands with a dead line in sight over a couple days.
Let me some things up that Eric couldn’t finished;
I started with the Windows Vista customization problem, but first let met tell you something about the client. Vista was deployed with Windows BDD 2007 in a virtual machine and customized using the build-in Sysprep by my colleagues of the IT team for the customer. After my colleagues had installed all the software it was time to convert the vm into a template waiting to be deployed. But unfortunately it is not that easy as just reading the administrator guide and do what there stands. I tackled this problem with troubleshooting on this way.
Troubleshooting the Customization problems;
“%windir%\System32\Sysprep”
“%windir%\PantherUnattend\GCsetupact.log” – Contains the sysprep information, like the domain join.
“%windir%\PantherUnattend\GCsetuperr.log” – Contains the error information generated by sysprep.
“%windir%\Temp\vmware-imc\guestcust.log” – Information of the customize scripts of VMware.
“%windir%\Temp\vmware-imc\toolsDeployPkg.log” – Scripts that are copied by the VMware Bootrun Service.
and information about the customization process.
Two of our customers has Windows XP as there client machines. After making the clients available for running as a virtual machine, one customer experienced very poor performance. If the connection to the vm was established it seems everything was running fine, but once we started Internet Explorer the screen refresh was slow as a RDP connection over a 56k modem. We tried connecting to the virtual machine without using the View Client and we experienced no performance / refresh trouble. Very strange, the next day the technical staff of the customer noticed that if they started the View Client as an local administrator they had no poor performance and the speed was just as fast as connecting with the RDP client. From this stage I thought maybe it is a security problem but wait, if so why do I not have this problem with my laptop logged on as a standard user? Lets find out on my way in troubleshooting this nice problem while the deadline is almost in sight.
Troubleshooting the Performance problems;
“C:Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Modi\11.0” - Read / Write Access
“C:Windows\System32\configSoftware.log” - Read Access
“C:All Users\Application Data\VMwareVDMLogs” - Read / Write Access
Some other troubleshooting information;
Finally all problems were solved and VMware View is up and running perfectly. It was nice to be busy again with some great products of VMware like this one. So Eric as you can read I saved you from a lot of trouble 
but I will be honest, It was a pleasure.
Sometimes you need simple scripts like a ping script. My script reads a text file that contains all the devices you need to ping, the output is displayed on the screen and saved into a simple log file. You can adjust the following variables;
| # Ping Script # # Author : A.R.Winters # Script : Ping Hosts # Date : 10/04/2009 # Version : v0.1 # Comments : none # Final Version : # Application Variables # Function Ping-Host # Read text file ping the machines… |
After the release of Amarok 2 I tried it out and I didn’t liked it, there are to many features missing that I used in Amarok 1.4. For example I used the equalizer in Amarok 1.4 to make my sound of my Logitech speakers hear better but the Amarok 2 version doesn’t have a equalizer and you don`t want to know how it sounds right now. I read in a few blogs of the Amarok developers that the equalizer will be returned, but when???? I decided not to wait on the features to be developed if Amarok 1.4 is still available. So this is what I did on my newly fresh Kubuntu Jaunty 9.04 Beta installation:
Be sure that is pointing to intrepid, the jaunty pkg is still not available.
Update: Jaunty packages are available now!
###KDE3 & Amarok 1.4
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bogdanb/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/bogdanb/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
wgethttp://apt.pearsoncomputing.net/public.gpgsudo apt-key add public.gpg
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install amarok-kde3
Updated 10 April 2009
About two weeks ago I ran into some strange problems in the VMware ESX 3.5 environment from one of our customers, I was very busy with the restore of a few databases in our testing cluster. After I was almost finished I had to add an extra vmdk to the test SQL server, so I logged into vCenter and I see that one of the ESX hosts in the test cluster was disconnected. I tried to connect the disconnected ESX server with the vi-client directly but unfortunately all that I get was a connection error. So I tryed to login with putty but also no response…. hmmm strange; server is responding on ping. I asked my self the question “What the heck is wrong here?” to bad I did not had the administrator password from the iLO console so I couldn’t look at the console to see what was wrong.
After a few minutes I saw that the SQL server I was working on was also in the disconnected state, but my console session with the server was still active. I did some ping testing from the command line of the SQL server to other servers in the testing cluster, I was amazed! all the VM’s that had the disconnected status in vCenter were still running.
Sometimes you need a simple script to read the contents of a text file. Today I wrote the script below. The script reads the content of the text file and displays the text on your screen. For example you need to add some users to your system then replace the “echo” command with the “useradd” command. Username’s in the textfile will be added to your system.
#!/bin/sh
# Variables
TXT=FileName.txt
LOG=LogFileName-`date +%F`.log
# Read TXT file and define variables..
while read inputline
do
CONTENT=”$(echo $inputline | awk {‘print $1′})”
# Run the command
echo $CONTENT
done < $TXT
exit 0
The last two years I’m very driven into scripting / programming with the VMware API and SDK. My colleague Erik Scholten who`s also the owner of VMGuru.nl has send me some nice information about the GuessMyOS plug-in. The plug-in replaces the standard VMware virtual machine icons with guest OS-specific icons for Windows and Linux guests.
Here is a picture of how it looks in vCenter.
If you like to have more information about this plugin than you need this link:
http://community.hyper9.com/blogs/
For more information about creating your own vCenter plugins look at this site:
http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vc-sdk/vcplugin-exp/
Note: Support for VC Plug-ins is Experimental, and is subject to change in future releases.
New KB Article posted: you can find it here
A Few minutes ago I read an interesting article of three different virtualization hypervisors. The three hypervisors (VMware / Citrix and Microsoft) were tested against each other for best performing hypervisor. All tests were executed with the same workload to give a fair accounting of their performance. VMware is these days still the leader for server virtualization, of course Citrix and Microsoft virtualization products will not leave behind. What I noticed was that VMware’s hypervisor didn`t have the best result! Did I made you curious? then read the article at the following site:
A little update: My colleague told me that there have been a lot of discussion with the hypervisor tests, many specialists have there opinion about the tests. I have some links were you can read the reply`s on this tests.
Last year I was asked by my company how I felt to give a workshop to my colleagues about Linux, of course I was flattered. Unfortunately I did not have the time to dive deeper into the Linux kernel for further explaining in my presentation, so with this information my presentation will be a much nicer. Well here you go, a nice interactive map of the Linux kernel which will guide you true the hole kernel.
Interactive map of the Linux kernel
