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Twitter?…..Why NotMy random thoughts on virtualization can be found here. Add to the conversation. Update - Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Hang Issues Continue, but with hope.The troubleshooting continues from the problems I have been having with Virtual Server 2005 SP1 (see http://virtuallyaware.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!549C424F228D6040!125.entry for the background). It looks like the root cause to the "Hang" problem is the hypervisor. Not sure who's fault it is, Microsoft or HP, but if I uncheck ALL the "Enable hardware-assisted virtualization if available" check boxes from the general properties of each guest, the "Hanging" of the guest during startups and save state restores goes away. I also do not get the "Hang" if I disable processor virtualization on the processor in the BIOS. I have a ticket open with MS at the moment and hopefully will get a fix. When I do i will pass it on. I know there is a growing number of you that are seeing similar problems.
-Rob Expand your System Drive With VMToolKits VHD ResizerI was looking through the Microsoft new groups today and answered a question that I have done a few times so I thought it would be a good time to blog about it here. The task is how to expand a system drive that is running out of space. I used to do this by creating a second VHD that was larger than my original then mount up both to the guest and boot up a BartPE disk and then use ghost to image one disk to the larger disk. This was slow and painful, especially since BartPE didn't really have any knowledge of virtual machine additions. As more tools for virtual servers came about, this task became easier. Below I outline different ways that I do this. VMtoolkit VHD Resizer is your friend. All of the techniques below use this utility The problem with increasing the size of a System partition is that using the built in Windows Server 2003 utility diskpart, will not work for an "active" system drive. This is how it can be done. The trick is to make the system drive a non-active drive or secondary drive. Option #1 Use the VMToolkit VHD Resizer utility to increase the VHD file to what you want. This actually creates a secondary VHD file and moves the data over to it. Then mount this VHD file to a drive letter using the VHDMount utility in VS 2005 SP1. Then go to a command prompt, and using the diskpart utility, select the mounted volume and use the diskpart /extend command. This assumes you are using Windows Server 2003 however. Then unmount the vhd, make sure it is attach to the correct virtual guest, and boot it up. You should have an expanded system drive. Option #2 Option #3 Still using ghost but faster: Like the old way of creating a secondary VHD file, but instead of booting BartPE in the virtual guest, you will mount both VHDs with the vhdmount utility of VS 2005 SP1 on the virtual host system. Then you will put your BartPE CD that has ghost as an application into the host. Then use ghost to do a disk to disk transfer. The benefits of this is that you use the native speed of the host system drives to do the image from one disk to the expanded disk. I don't use this option all that often, but it is a viable option for expanding a vhd system disk.
If you have methods of expanding virtual system disks, please drop me a line and let me know.
-Rob Update - KB941125 - The Virtual Server service may stop responding when the service is starting if one or more of the virtual machines are configured to automatically start when the Virtual Server service starts***************************************************************************************************************************************************** Update 12/24/2007 After some further testing, the problem with Virtual Server 2005 SP1 continues. Notes: KB941125 did help some. It eliminated the complete freezing of the web console, but the guests still get hung up and are unresponsive to any commands. Setting the resource allocation to the default 100 does not seem to be any help. All of my guests have been at the default 100 and I have seen the re-occurrence of the guest freezing. We continue to test one of our HP DL585 G2 systems with VS 2005 R2 SP1, but have returned the other one back to VS 2005 R2 without SP1. That server has not skipped a beat since the switch. Since the older version knows nothing about hardware virtualization, that might be the road to look at in troubleshooting the VS 2005 R2 SP1 system.Other options tried: AMD Opteron™ Processor with AMD PowerNow!™ Technology Driver Version 1.3.2.0053 for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 (x86 and x64) - This was to solve the problem with time shift between processor cores that would give negative ping times and would show event id 1054. Below are some articles that outline this. http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871_9033,00.html http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938448/en-us ********************************************************************************************************************************************************* Let me start out by saying that my experience with Virtual Server and all the subsequent versions that followed have been relatively bug free. This is the first one that really stopped me from progressing to Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. At first I thought what I had was a corrupt install, but after a few rebuilds of the systems and looking at firmware and drivers everything looked fine. The main symptom I saw was that every time I put the servers into saved state either manually or with a script, when restoring to running state, the web interface would not be accessible nor would the VMRC or VMRCplus or any type of communication. The guest servers would not ping or be able to be shutdown with a script. The whole Virtual Server COM API was not accessible. The only way to fix this would be to kill the vssrvc.exe process, restart the virtual server service and then discard the saved states of the guests. If you tried to restore the saved state of the guests, you would go into the inaccessibility again. Upon starting the guest servers back up from an off state, everything would work just fine, until the next saved state which in our case is sometimes during our scripted backups or on a shutdown script we have in place or when I felt like save stating any guest. We do have 2 other virtual hosts running Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 that seem to be working just fine. The 2 hosts that were showing this problem are DL585G2 systems with AMD-V. Not sure if this is linked to the overall problem, but the DL585G1(AMD without AMD-V) and DL380G4 (Intel Xeon without VT) have not experienced this problem at all. Lets hope this is the last of the bugs for now. At least until Hyper-V.
***************************************************************** Attached is the news group string. So, do you have to install the patch and do one of the workarounds or VSMT Speed Tweak Part 1This is part one of the various VSMT Speed Tweaks that I have found in my experiences with the Virtual Server Migration Toolkit. Each one will save you a little time from beginning to end that adds up to significant time savings. This not only allows you to mitigate the application downtime necessary to migrate a system into your virtual environment, but also allows you to get home to your wife and kids at a reasonable hour and may even keep you out of the dog house. Before running the GatherHW command on a system, disable or set to manual non-essential and application specific services. Once the server has been deployed into the virtual environment install virtual machine additions and uninstall apps that are not needed anymore i.e. various HP Management Agents or other hardware based software. Then, re-enabled the application specific services again. Leaving these set to automatic, especially during the first boot into the new virtual environment after the deploy process, can significant increase the amount of time it takes for the system to rediscover hardware and allow access to the system. Below is the documentation section we use to record these steps.
Not Able To Migrate Dynamic Disks With VSMT? I Think Not.While tinkering around with a recent migration that of an older production server running Windows 2000 server on a Compaq DL320 G1 server, I discovered that it was configured with software RAID 1 with Dynamic Disks. Once I saw this I immediately thought that I was in for a long night of potentially ghosting and then manually stripping out the HAL and potentially a repair install. When I ran the hardware validate on my XML file, my fears were confirmed where it stated that no drives were available for migration.
Microsoft (R) Virtual Server Migration Toolkit - VmScript Tool ver.5.2.5149.0
Copyright (C) 2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Parsing file: C:\Program Files\Microsoft VSMT\DH517.xml
WARNING: Found a partition of "Unknown" type.
The partition will be skipped from imaging.
Details: (Disk:0 Partition:1 Type:255 Hosted Logical Drives:)
WARNING: Dynamic disks are not supported.
The disk/partition will be skipped from imaging.
Details: (Disk:0 Partition:2 Type:66 Hosted Logical Drives:C:)
WARNING: Dynamic disks are not supported.
The disk/partition will be skipped from imaging.
Details: (Disk:0 Partition:3 Type:66 Hosted Logical Drives:D:)
WARNING: Found a partition of "Unknown" type.
The partition will be skipped from imaging.
Details: (Disk:1 Partition:1 Type:255 Hosted Logical Drives:C:)
WARNING: Dynamic disks are not supported.
The disk/partition will be skipped from imaging.
Details: (Disk:1 Partition:2 Type:66 Hosted Logical Drives:)
WARNING: Dynamic disks are not supported.
The disk/partition will be skipped from imaging.
Details: (Disk:1 Partition:3 Type:66 Hosted Logical Drives:D:)
WARNING: Dynamic disks are not supported.
The disk/partition will be skipped from imaging.
Details: (Disk:1 Partition:4 Type:66 Hosted Logical Drives:)
Checking configuration for incompatibilities.
ERROR: Could not find a supported partition type that hosts the windows directory.
ERROR: Configuration is not compatible.
Warning: Incompatibilities found in hardware config.
Error: Result Code:10
The only good thing I could think of coming out of this night was that the 24 hour AuBon Pan gives reduced price pastries starting at midnight. Even with this late night temptation in mind, I started to think about alternate options.
From what I tried with WinImage v8.0 on a previous migration (See this post), changing the drive type within the XML file so that it would not migrate a specific drive, I thought that I would try to modify the XML file in this case to try to see if for some strange reason the dynamic drives would migrate. Below are the lines that I changed to make the process work.
<SystemComponent name="Partition"> <Data item="Index"><![CDATA[1]]></Data> <Data item="Caption"><![CDATA[Disk #0, Partition #1]]></Data> <Data item="Size"><![CDATA[6292339200]]></Data> <Data item="NumberOfBlocks"><![CDATA[12289725]]></Data> <Data item="StartingOffset"><![CDATA[41126400]]></Data> <Data item="DiskIndex"><![CDATA[0]]></Data> <Data item="Bootable"><![CDATA[-1]]></Data> <Data item="PrimaryPartition"><![CDATA[-1]]></Data> <Data item="Type"><![CDATA[Logical Disk Manager]]></Data> <SystemComponent name="PartitionLogicalDrive"> <Data item="LogicalDrive"><![CDATA[C:]]></Data> <Data item="StartAddress"><![CDATA[41126400]]></Data> <Data item="EndAddress"><![CDATA[6333465599]]></Data> <Data item="BootINI"><![CDATA[[boot loader] timeout=5 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Server" /fastdetect ]]></Data> </SystemComponent> </SystemComponent> <SystemComponent name="Partition"> <Data item="Index"><![CDATA[2]]></Data> <Data item="Caption"><![CDATA[Disk #0, Partition #2]]></Data> <Data item="Size"><![CDATA[11869079040]]></Data> <Data item="NumberOfBlocks"><![CDATA[23181795]]></Data> <Data item="StartingOffset"><![CDATA[6333465600]]></Data> <Data item="DiskIndex"><![CDATA[0]]></Data> <Data item="PrimaryPartition"><![CDATA[0]]></Data> <Data item="Type"><![CDATA[Logical Disk Manager]]></Data> <SystemComponent name="PartitionLogicalDrive"> <Data item="LogicalDrive"><![CDATA[D:]]></Data> <Data item="StartAddress"><![CDATA[6333465600]]></Data> <Data item="EndAddress"><![CDATA[18202544639]]></Data> </SystemComponent>
I changed the lines above that are in bold and underlined to the following: <Data item="Type"><![CDATA[Installable File System]]></Data>
Note: Since this was a software mirror with dynamic disk, I only changed the first references to C: and D: in the XML file that resided on the first SCSI disk. The end result, the process worked. I expected it to quit during the capture stage, but it finished. Then I figured that it would fail on the deploy stage, but it proceeded as normal. I would certainly be faced with a blue screen on boot, but all was well with the first boot. So what did it look like when I finished? It migrated all data drives from the first SCSI disk flawlessly and made them Basic disks on deployment into virtual. Since I did not change the XML entries for the Second SCSI disk in the XML file, it did not migrate them at all. Strange, but it worked. Give it a try and let me know what you get for results. WinImage to speed up VSMT Migrations.I purchased WinImage, from Gilles Vollant Software, a while back in the versions 6 or 7 days do make self-extracting executables of some of our boot floppies when we were doing automated installs of server hardware. In version 8 however, they came out with an excellent feature that works in 2 different ways for us here at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. The first use was to provide a way to do individual file restores from .VHD files that had been committed to tape or disk as part of our nightly backup routine. It was very nice with the ability view and extract individual files from a remote, non-mounted .VHD file over the network and to restore individual files instead of large .VHD files. The sweeter feature that we have used a few times during P2V migrations is the "Create Virtual Hard Disk image from physical drive" option. For those systems that have a second C: and D: drive, where the D: drive is just data, we have installed WinImage on the physical server to be migrated and then used the "Create Virtual Hard Disk image from physical drive" option and had it dump the file to a virtual host system. This left me with a nice .VHD file of my data drive waiting for the rest of the server to go through the P2V process. Then within the XML file created from the gatherHW.exe command I just change the line (SERVERNAME.XML): <Data item="Type"><![CDATA[Installable File System]]></Data> To <Data item="Type"><![CDATA[Unknown]]></Data> For the D: drive reference. This tells the Hardware Validate option in the P2V step to not try to capture the D: drive during the capture phase of the migration. This works pretty slick, and once the C: drive has been Captured and Deployed to its new virtual home, adding the D: drive .VHD file to the guest configuration is all you have to do before you boot the new guest up for the first time. It save me quite a bit of time on P2V migrations since the file copy is only happening once and not twice as the normal Capture and Deploy of VSMT. I will give the full list of VSMT speed tweaks I have found in an upcoming blog. Until then, give WinImage a try and feel free to post any questions. |
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