Hypervisor war in virtual land

Not so long ago (14th of December) Mohammed Fawzi posted a blogpost called Hyper-V vs VMWare. In this post he wanted to put together a comparison of Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMWare’s ESX (Enterprise). Although I don’t think he accomplished what he wanted to accomplish with that post (comparing the two hypervisors), he managed to accomplish something. And that something is what is not in the article itself, but in the comments beneath it. It started a really firm, mostly technical and sometimes even emotional, response of the community that he was comparing apples with grapes and doing it all wrong.

The replies didn’t even stop at Mohammed Fawzi’s blogpost, but even resulted in new articles stating the faults he made when he compared the two. The writers (Scott Lowe and Jason Boche) of those articles are writers whose blogposts I read with great care and are (in my opinion) really interesting.

This rumble in hypervisor land remembered me at the console wars where fanboys were flaming that their console is the best and the rest of the gaming consoles were rubbish. Although the comments and articles really don’t represent the behaviour of those fanboys flaming about their favourite console, I recognised some of the emotions that appeared and how heavily the community reacted on it.

I myself work a lot with HP equipment and use VMWare ESX as my hypervisor and I think it was the best solution in my situation. Just as with gaming consoles I believe the best hypervisor is the one that fits best in your situation. And above all I like the idea of more than one choice in hypervisor land. It will keep everyone awake and new functions will be developed to have that one unique selling point.

What the community doesn’t need is a break because there isn’t a trustworthy datasource. What the community does need is a factual datasheet comparing the two so that when we have to make that choice or when we have to write that business case we all have the facts. I like to know what Microsoft is doing and how it solves problems with their solution as well as how VMWare does those things. I hope I can learn from that and one day I can use that to my advantage and solve a problem or make the correct decision using all my knowledge.

The only question that remains is: Who is going to make that factual datasheet that is trustworthy?

Beacon probing explained

I was browsing through the VMWare blogs and I ran into the VMWare networking blog. They posted a really nice article about when to use beacon probing. Although it was already posted on the 10th of december I thought it was worth mentioning.

Beaconing is one of those features that often confuses even the most experienced networking admin.

Shudong Zhou, one of our senior engineers, recently posted an entry on the internal blog explaining how it works and how you might use it. He gave me permission to cut and paste his entry. Here it is …

Read the rest of the article here at the VMWare Networking Blog

Making inactive storage active in VirtualCenter

Today a power outage hit our datacenter for several hours. This was too long for the UPS so everything was shut down since we don’t have any backup generator or something like that. However when power came back on the ESX hosts booted faster as our storage controllers. I logged into VirtualCenter and I saw that none of my virtual machines were powered on automatically. They were greyed out with “(inaccessible)” behind the names. I googled, but couldn’t find anything related to my problem.

When I looked at the ESX hosts they weren’t showing my SAN datastores. So I went to my commandview EVA server and looked if the LUN’s were there. In fact first they weren’t there, but after a while they finally appeared. I turned back to my VirtualCenter and looked if the datastores also would appear automatically again, but that apparently was too much to ask. Not knowing what to do I started looking around what I could do. I looked at the storage adapter configuration of one of the ESX hosts and the HBA’s were nicely listed, but still no LUN’s. Finally just before I wanted to reboot the entire host I discovered I could rescan the HBA with right clicking on the HBA and then click “Rescan”. After the rescan was finished my datastores returned and I was back in business.

For the people who like to do everything at the commandline you can use the command:
esxcfg-rescan vmhba[0...n]

There’s no place like ::1!

My girlfriend and I want to buy a new doormat, but never I would have imagined that she would suggest it would be a doormat with the text “There’s no place like 127.0.0.1″. A lot of people in IT know the phrase “There’s no place like 127.0.0.1″, but “There’s no place like ::1″ isn’t that common yet. ::1 is the IPv6 equivalent of 127.0.0.1 which is the IPv4 address for localhost or as meant in the saying “home”.

A quick search on the internet for ”There’s no place like ::1″ didn’t turn up any doormats or any other merchandise, but i’m sure it will appear someday. So I will probably settle for a doormat with “There’s no place like 127.0.0.1″ for now, but when IPv6 becomes widely accepted I also want a doormat that is IPv6 compatible.

P.S.: Because of the doormat my interest in IPv6 grew again and I surely will post more about that later.

Black background at the login screen

! Warning: Editing the registry is a tricky thing. If you change something important you might destroy your Windows. The author of this article is in no way responsible for any damage caused!

Our mailserver experienced a weird phenomenon today. Whenever we wanted to log in, the input boxes of the login screen were black and so was the title in the window header. After some searching and finding this useful Microsoft KB 906510, I was pointed to the registry and specifically to the location HKU\.Default\Control Panel\Colors. I applied the workaround from the Microsoft KB (which was exporting the registry keys from a healthy server and then importing them to the mailserver) and it worked again.

I got interested and was questioning myself what all the keys did in HKU\.Default\Control Panel\Colors. So for me and those who are interested a list of all the keys, their default values (for Windows Server 2003) and what specific part they affect (the ones I could quickly find).

Installing MOSS 2007 on Windows Server 2008

When I was trying to install MOSS 2007 on Windows Server 2008 I ran into an error stating that there is a known compatibility issue with this version and that I should install it with the latest service pack. After a quick search I ran into a blogpost from Matt Hester who ran into the same problem. He posted a really good screencast about installing MOSS 2007 on Windows Server 2008.

The solution is really simple. You just have to slipstream WSS 3.0 SP1 and MOSS 2007 SP1 into the install CD. The first step you take is copying the install CD onto your local hard drive. After you have done that you can download the service packs from the Microsoft website. When the downloads are finished you run both of the setups with the parameter /extract:[pathtoinstallcd] (replace [pathtoinstallcd] with the full path to the location you copied your MOSS 2007 install CD).

If you executed the steps correctly you can now run the setup and start installing MOSS 2007.

Excel error at startup

At work we got some calls that when starting Excel an error message appeared. It was saying that a class is not registered and it was looking for an object with CLSID: {AC9F290-E877-11CE-9F68-00AA00574A4F}. 

 

After some searching I found a Microsoft KB article 182500 stating that fm20.dll might be missing or incorrectly registered. This KB applied to Excel 97, but apparently it was still happening in Excel 2000. In my case fm20.dll only needed to be registered with the command regsvr32.exe fm20.dll, which I started from the run window. 

I pressed OK and a notification came up saying the dll was succesfully registered. When I started Excel the error was dissapeared.