Category Archives: VMWare

Freebie VMWare ESXi 5.5

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So on reddit, I came across this link to download a free version of VMWare ESXi with Vcenter.

Naturally I had to give it a shot.  And run it on my desktop for the heck of it.

VMWare download page

VMWare download page

And with the 3 files downloaded, I simply fired up VMWare Player, created a new VM, and pointed the setup program to the ESXi ISO ( VMware-VMvisor-Installer-5[1].5.0.update01-1623387.x86_64.iso), and it figured out we were going to do a nested VMWare install on it’s own.  The only thing I had to change was the network card from NAT to bridged.

Because I’m just going to use this install for testing (I haven’t put it on hardware just yet), the default DHCP is just fine, but enabling SSH on the console will be important.  Remember to record the root password for the ESXi box as you’ll use that to point the client to it.

ESXi 5 on VMWare Player

ESXi 5 on VMWare Player

The installation was pretty simple.

Now because I wind up using various versions of VMWare for work, I don’t want to try to keep 4.x and various 5.x clients balanced on a PC, I just run them on various VMs.  However, 5.5 has an issue with Windows XP.  The SSL implementation is out of date.  Naturally there is a hotfix, KB948963, but it will only install on Windows Server 2003.

VMWare SSL failure on XP

Network failure KB948963

I suppose booting into safe mode and overwriting the DLL’s by hand may be an option, but because it is only me talking to my ESXi server I don’t need it to be on the internet, so the easier option is to tell ESXi to allow all SSL types.

After some searching, the best fix I’ve seen is from the VMWare forums, by RichardVM:

ssh into the ESXi host and modify the following file:

/etc/vmware/rhttpproxy/config.xml

Insert the following xml line into the appropriate section:

<vmacore>
…
<ssl>
…
<cipherList>ALL</cipherList>
…
</ssl>
…
</vmacore>

 

After saving your changes restart the service:

/etc/init.d/rhttpproxy restart

And you’ll be good to go.

VMWare ESX on Player

VMWare ESXi 5.5 + Vcenter running on VMWare Player on Windows 7

For a simple test I installed an old copy of Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server, which works fine (remember NT 4.0 on ESX5 needs SP6 installed for the networking to work).

VMware license

Applying the VMware license

As you can see once you apply the license you get from VMWare certain features are disabled.

vmware license

2 sockets, unlimited logical processors, no ram limit, never expires!

As you can see this may be more ‘limited’ from the Vcenter’s perspective, but this license doesn’t expire and is good enough for ‘at home’.

For those needing and wanting more, the next step is the VMware vSphere Essentials Kit package, which is $560 USD.  But this is good enough to get your feet wet in the world of VMWare.

Running Virtual PC 2007 on VMWare Player

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I’ve always liked Virtual PC, and it was a shame IMHO when Microsoft twisted this fantastic utility in some glorified IE6 box, A’la “Windows XP Mode” for Windows 7.

So I downloaded and installed VMWare Player, as I’ve heard you can use it to run ESX among other things requiring hardware acceleration, and  player fits the bill for being cheap.

Passing the hardware acceleration to a child VM is a matter of checking a single box in the settings.  Namely the ‘Virtualize Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI” box.  Although you don’t have to click it if you want, it just offers greater performance.

Windows XP x64 setup

VMWare Player

Now I installed my old copy of XP x64, as I felt like something different, then I went ahead and installed Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 sp1.  The installation was pretty uneventful.

Now with that out of the way, I could setup a VM,and I decided to install OS/2 1.21 for the heck of it.

OS2 1.21 on virtual pc on VMWare player

Virtual PC running OS/2 1.21 without hardware acceleration

And it booted up no problems, like it did back in the XP days.  I even ran it with and without CPU acceleration and it works on both, but is noticeably faster with acceleration.

With Intel-VT acceleration

With Intel-VT acceleration

So I thought this was interesting, although Virtual PC has been essentially dead ended, it can go on with an older OS in a VM, to let you run VMs.

I would imagine that if VMWare Player could run Virtual PC 2007, that 2004 should work as well.

VMWare Vcenter/ESX 5.5

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Well, it’s been a long while since I used Vcenter, and now it’s gone all web based.  Which is a damned shame IMHO.

But the plus is that ESX can now run nested!

The first stumbling block was installing vSphere.  The 2008r2 server that I’ve been given access to is part of a domain, but I’ve only got local access to the server.  The annoying part is trying to logon right after install.  My Windows user ID doesn’t work, and logging in as ‘admin’ or ‘Administrator’ doesn’t work.  Thankfully I found a hint, to install SQL Management Express to mine the VPX_ACCESS table (my SQL Express instance was \VIM_SQLEXP), and discover that the Administrator logon is

VSPHERE.LOCAL\Administrator

Now with that in place I can now logon to my vSphere.

Screen Shot 2014-02-20 at 7.30.14 PM

The next fun is configuring the ESX VM.

Screen Shot 2014-02-20 at 7.28.07 PM

By default, it’ll try to DCHP itself.  Which is great if you have DHCP, but in my small test area on the cloud I don’t have DHCP.

One huge pain I find is that you have to manage version 10 VM’s through the web UI, which let’s face it is dreadfully slow.  Also it looks like you still need the ‘fat’ client to manage storage.  Ugh.

I’ll probably update this more the further along I get.

VMware PVSCSI under WinPE

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(note this is a guest post from Tenox)

I needed to use Windows PE with paravirtualized SCSI driver under VMware. Most blog posts I came across mention the same very wrong thing: grab pvscsi driver folder from VMware Tools location and insert to WinPE .wim file using dism /add-driver. Wrong, on two levels!

First of all the mentioned folder C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\Drivers\ contains only one subfolder “hgfs” and does not contain pvscsi, vmxnet3 or mouse drivers. In order to find the required drivers you need to extract contents of the VMware Tools CD Image (windows.iso). Once you can grab setup.exe you need to extract it’s contents to a separate folder using a special switch. There is a KB article how to do it exactly.

Unfortunately above does not work either. Even with the pvscsi driver correctly inserted in to the .wim file, diskpart was still unable to see disks attached to PVSCSI controller. After some research I’ve found that one must have so called text-setup mode driver for it to work correct. For example if you are installing Dell PERC driver it will come with characteristic txtsetup.oem file.

Fortunately VMware distributes text-setup drivers on a floppy disk image formerly called vmscsi.flp. My VMware Workstation has a file called pvscsi_windows2008.flp under “C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\Resources” folder. Upon mounting the floppy image a correct pvscsi driver with txtsetup.oem showed up and I was able to copy and insert it to WinPE .wim file using dism /add-driver. Now I can see my paravirtualized hard disks.

pvscsi

I’m not going to go in to detail how to add these drivers to a .wim file as you can find it elsewhere on the web pretty easily.

Booting from USB in VMware Workstation

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(note this is a guest post from Tenox)

Jason’s note on hybrid bootable ISO reminded me of a recent discovery. I have a bootable USB pen drive that I wanted to boot in VMware Workstation. Normally impossible, but there always is a work around! Turns out the problem is with the VMware built-in BIOS and more specifically lack of USB boot support. All you have to do is get a bootable media, floppy or CDROM with a boot loader that can redirect you to the USB device. I’m using Plop. Important thing to remember is to connect the USB pen drive to the virtual machine in a pass through mode. Also it’s very very slow.

Installing OS/2 2.0 on VMware ESXi 4.0

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Well the good news is that it works… mostly.

The install is SUPER tedious through the console with mounting and ejecting diskettes. But I was able to do all of that from the comfort of my home on a VPS that does VMWare, enscloud.com.

The great thing about OS/2 is that IBMINT13.I13 driver. I’m pretty sure trying to find a suitably old “LSI Logic SAS” driver may be quite difficult, but as long as the adapter does good old interrupt 13 services, OS/2 can drive it.

So with OS/2 2.0 installed, then updated, and TCP/IP installed I thought things would work as there actually is e1000 drivers floating around for OS/2…. Except all I get is a trap and death.

x

Trap 0006.  Talk about a bummer.

From some minor googling around it seems it’s a known issue, with no current fix.

OS2-on-vmware

So close, and yet so far away

Oh well.

** UPDATE in all likely hood all that is required is the unofficial update XR_B108, for OS/2 2.1 which apparently works with networking on VMware Player.

Migrating Windows 2000 servers to Proxmox/VE

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I’m not going to get into the a super amount of detail here… Maybe the next server I do, but not right now. The mergeide registry addition didn’t work for me. Maybe it’s because this was an old server that was converted to VMWare?

It was Windows NT 4.0 when it was physical, then it was converted to VMWare 2.x back when that was new, then upgraded to Windows 2000, then migrated across to VMWare 3.x where it sat dormant. However it now needed to be brought back to life, so the first step was to remove the old VMWare tools. And that proved to be an episode on it’s own (make copies of all your VMWare Tools ISO’s!!).

Once that was squared away, I kind of expected to load mergeide.reg, then shut down SQL Server, fire up SelfImage, and transfer away. But I was instead greeted with a BSOD, the infamous *** STOP: 0x0000007B (0x818B51B0, 0xC00000010, 0x00000000,0x00000000) INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE

So I tried manually adding in the IDE drivers, and then using BartPE to quickly copy the c:\winnt\system32\config\system* files. Well that didn’t work either.

Much to my luck, Proxmox/VE includes SCSI emulation, because it’s based on KVM which in turn uses the hardware framework from Qemu. So it can use the sym_895a.sys driver from LSI which can be downloaded from here. So within Windows 2000, on VMWare I was able to load up the LSI/SYM scsi driver (which hides in the miniport directory on the zip file).

With the driver loaded, I shut down the VM yet again, booted back up with BartPE, and re-copied over the system registry files (c:\winnt\system32\config\system*) along with the scsi driver (c:\winnt\system32\drivers\sym_895a.sys). Now with those in place, I could then finally reset the VM on Proxmox/VE and get this….

So in the end it is finally transfered, I used the ‘pcnet’ Ethernet adapter to maintain the same NIC drivers. So far all seems pretty snappy with it.

VMWare ESX 2.5 on Qemu 0.14.0

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Ok this is going to sound crazy but here we go!

Today I’m migrating this old SQL 7/Windows 2000 database server from VMWare ESX 3.5 to Proxmox VE. However this server started out on a VMWare ESX 2.5 server. And in the subsequent years had been decommissioned , and never updated but rather just copied onto the 3.5 cluster as we decommissioned the 2.5 cluster. At least I figured disk space was cheap enough we should keep the old VMs that “we will never need again” because.. Eventually someone will panic, and realize they need it again.

In the first step of doing so I needed to remove the old version of VMWare tools. But the catch is, this old version requires you to have the msi package handy to remove it. Well isn’t that a fun little catch. And you’ll find all kinds of ideas on what to do now that you don’t have your original “VMWare Tools.msi”. And more importantly you’ll now realize that you should have not only saved your old ISOs of ESX, but you should have also pulled out the tools ISOs and saved them as well.

Luckily I did save the software keys thought! Although I suspect that is also somewhere on their website, but they make it a chore to find the old stuff.. At any rate with 30 minutes of searching I finally came across the last version of 2.5, ESX Server 2.5.5 Build 57619.

Now it would seem that the VMWare tools are kept in an RPM file. Which is going to be a major pita for me to extract on Windows so I decided to take the more insane route, and install ESX on Qemu!

First I create a 5GB IDE disk to boot VMWare ESX server off, and a 10GB SCSI disk for the vmfs.

qemu-img.exe create -f raw esx25.disk 5G
Formatting ‘esx25.disk’, fmt=raw size=5368709120

qemu-img.exe create -f qcow2 esx-scsi.disk 10G
Formatting ‘esx-scsi.disk’, fmt=qcow2 size=10737418240 encryption=off cluster_size=0

With the disks created, I then fire up Qemu like this:

qemu-system-x86_64 -cpu Opteron_G2 -L pc-bios -m 512 -hda esx25.disk -drive file=esx-scsi.disk,if=scsi,bus=0,unit=0 -option-rom 8xx_64.rom -net nic,model=e1000 -net user -net nic,model=e1000 -redir tcp:8088::80 -redir tcp:8022::22 -redir tcp:8433::443 -cdrom \install\esx-2.5.5-57619.iso -boot d

This pulls in a few things, the SCSI configuration along with the AMD CPU type configuration that I’ve touched on previously.

qemu 0.14.0 ESX 2.5 boot

And away we go!

ESX 2.5 install

And Qemu should easily boot the graphical installer.

ESX 2.5 system

So using my configuration, I dedicate one Ethernet card to ESX, another to the guests, and share the SCSI adapter between the console and the guests…

ESX 2.5 partitions

And when it comes to the partitioning, I simply extended the root partition to the rest of the drive, and setup vmfs2 on the SCSI disk. I’m not even thinking about clustering, I’m primarily after the extensions.

installing

Installation takes about 20 minutes. It is just the way it is. The pegasus cimom for linux takes forever, along with the provider-esx package. I have no idea why, it’s probably thousands of little files or something crazy like that. But be patient, it’ll install.

ESX 2.5 installed

And there we go, a successful installation!

Now VMWare will want to reboot, I just kill Qemu, and then launch it booting off the IDE harddisk (-boot c).

ESX 2.5 boot options

Now we get an ESX and Linux boot menu. I’m feeling brave, so let’s try to boot ESX!

vmkernel loading..

It’s loading…

Purple screen of death

And it panics. Bug 1406:2154 BugNr=34866
“measured cpu and bus speeds conflict”

Oh well. But we can boot into Linux, and scp out the extensions! Which do hide in /usr/lib/vmware/isoimages/windows.iso . So it’s not a total loss. I did notice on VMWare Fusion there was a setting for ESX, perhaps I can run ESX 2.5.5 on my Mac? Perhaps, but I’ll try that for later.

Now with the ISO finally in hand, I put it in my VM, and tell it to uninstall the extensions, I provide it with the VMWare Tools.msi and I get…

The file VMWare Tools.msi is not a valid installation package for the product VMware Tools.
Try to find the installation package ‘VMware Tools.msi’ in a folder from which you can install VMware Tools.

However the ISO did offer a chance to ‘upgrade’ my apparently older 2.5 extensions. So I did that, rebooted, then with a matching level ISO I was able to remove them. Wow was that convoluted! If anything I guess we’ve found out you want to hold onto these extension CD’s not matter what.. You never know if someone comes in with an old VM, or if you had a decommissioned VM that suddenly has to be brought back to life, it’s best to have these handy to get them back into shape. Just because your setup is all ‘complete’ it doesn’t stop people from throwing you curve balls.

Revisiting Netware 3.12

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I know this is one of the really ‘hot issue’ things out there. Sadly the thing is that Qemu ran Netware 3.12 back in the 0.90 release, but not any release since then has been able to run it.

And after testing Netware 4.1 & 4.11 they too only run acceptably under Qemu 0.90

Otherwise on the newer versions, I get nothing but disk errors, even trying to used some 3rd party updated IDE drivers, it still does not work.

It’s very perplexing, and at the same point I know it’s not a burning priority for the Qemu team….

Proxmox/VE gets much further but ultimately I couldn’t get it all working…

Apparently it’ll run on VMWare, more information here.

One thing is for sure, Netware 3.12 and it’s “patching” system is a major nightmare.

Any Qemu higher then 0.9.0 gives this error….

“Abend: A directory buffer with no dirty bits set was encountered on the dirty list”

qemu 0.14.0 netware abend

qemu 0.14.0 netware abend

While there is the ‘scsi option’ for Qemu 0.12 and higher, you’ll need a BIOS… However for 3.12 it hinges on the DOS driver, which when loaded… crashes out Qemu.