Install VMWare ESXi 4.1 on USB stick

May 17th, 2012

As part o fmy VGA PCI passthrough testings, I wanted to install esxi on a USB stick.
After failed with several solutions (including lili usb creator, which works for 5.0) I found the following site that did better than putting the ISO on the USB stick: it literally installed esxi on the usb stick:

http://bitterbuds.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-to-install-vmware-vsphere.html

This might work for 5.0 as well but no time to test it yet.

The only problem is, I am not able to set up a datastore on it :( so guess I’m back to finding a sata hdd.

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VMWare ESXi shrink thin or thin provisioned disk

April 9th, 2012

If you’re like me, that is with a very limited cash availability to invest in hardware, you will most likely run out of space pretty fast once you start converting all those virtual machines you got on the desktop to your newly installed ESXi.
Now, you will immediately think, what happened to my thin provisioned disks that made them grow like that? You can google for the answer but let me tell you a better solution than what you will find on the net, which are:
- convert the virtual machine
- use some cdelete or whatever its name is to free up space
- maybe other things that are not as cool

The cool idea is that you can create a new disk, about the size that you need, and copy over the data to the new disk then delete the old one. Either use dd in linkux or whatever diskcopy you can find for windows (easeus has a few solutions) or use a system backup something that will pack up your files and then restore on the new disk.
This beats converting V2V as the hardware will not change.

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Create ESXi 5.0 ISO to USB bootable flash stick in windows

April 8th, 2012

I just got my hardware for my personal ESXi server (I will go into more detail in a separate post one of these days) and the first thing I noticed when I wanted to plug in my CD-ROM was that the MB had no IDE connector. I don’t have a sata cd-rom nor a usb one, so the next best thing, boot from USB.
Now, there are a lot of cool utilities out there to convert a bootable ISO image into a bootable USB stick, but from the aprox 3 or 4 I tried, only the last one worked. I even tried going manual, applying syslinux from command line, copying files and editing the configs. However, due to the fact that the file names are all in uppercase on the CD, the bootloader was not able to fins the kernel and stuff.

So, long story short, I found the following article which works for ESXi 5.0:

http://www.ivobeerens.nl/2011/09/17/create-a-bootable-vmware-esxi-5-usb-stick-in-windows-and-perform-a-scripted-installation/

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Oracle RAC Templates on VMWare ESXi

March 31st, 2012

A little while ago I started and managed to get an oracle RAC template to run from cmwares ESXi.
The long story short is that I installed OracleVM in a virtual machine created on the ESXi with a 100 GB hdd.
So basically now I had a hypervisor running inside a hypervisor. Yes, it works just fine.
Then installed oracle VMM on another virtual machine on the ESXi.
Then I enabled promiscuous mode on the virtual machines private vswitch. Absolutely a must. This is a deal breaker. Unless you do this, you will not be able to ping from domU into the internet, only another domU or dom0.
Then installed the RAC templates on the Oracle VM as normal, following the documentation.

At this point I was having a working RAC environment, with the only drawback that it had the overhead of running inside a secondary hypervisor.

So nect step is to move the RACs out of Oracle VM and into vmware ESXi.
This appears to be trickier. I tried vmware converter on the running RACs. Node 1 I converted as is but then it wouldn’t boot because it was running a XEN kernel and that is not supported by vmware.
So for node 2, I rebooted into the non-xen kernel, the el5euk one. I had to manually edit grub to boo that by default because as it seems, nice little oracle VM doesn’t give you much chooce to see the booting process. Maybe it’s possible but I didn’t had the need to figure out since I knew how to edit the boot menu.
Then I converted node 2 and now when it boots it will eventually go into a kernel panic as, the only errors I was able to see prior to the kernel pani, it cannot mount the partitions.
I tried installing different kernels by using a centos livecd and chroot-ing to it but to no avail.

Next step is to modify the original rac2 to have a modified non-xen, non-euk kernel and see if that works. If I don’t forget, I’ll keep you updated on this progress.

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VMWare player drag drop between virtual machines freezes one of them

March 4th, 2012

I am doing some testing and developing, using 2 virtual machines and I need to frequently move data between them. I figured easy way is to drag and drop from one directly to the other.
This was working fine until the source VM froze. I couldn’t even switch to it. or interact with it in any way.
I restarted all the vmware services to no avail.
Then I looked at the processes and notice vmware-unity-helper. :lightbulb:
Killed the process and everything went back ton normal.

PS: to all those who are watching my vmware related posts: in a about a month from now I’ll set up my first personal ESXi (I have one at work). That will be GOLD ;)

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How new programming styles and paradigms makes one stupid

February 20th, 2012

I think we all know by now how a big resource hog every single application today is.
I’ve been ranting for a while on browser memory hogs. All major of them. This are still unchanged. My FF currently eats up 2 GB of memory.

Here’s another fine programming example:
I was installing flash player 11.1, upgrade. However, the idiot started after my browser with about 100 tabs opened. So I left it running for the day in order to not forget to update at the end of the day.
And at the end of the day, I don’t remember why, I checked the task manager and surprise surprise: the upgrade program used 2 hours of CPU time, 300 MB of memory and 2.131.894 handles open…. over 2 million open handles.

Are you guys nuts?

Do none of you understand that system resource ARE FINITE and LIMITED?

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Delphi XE2 bug: memory leak

February 17th, 2012

That’s an easy one to reproduce if you are building a lot. All you need to do is keep building. Same project, or different one. Just keep building and watch the memory grow, grow until you get an Out of memory error.

Xe2 SP3. seriously? is this your level? The basic operations in your second version of XE at the 3rd service pack are still not working right? When in Gods name are you going to release a XE2 IDE that builds right? Am I really asking for too much? I haven’t even gotten to test the unicode and 64 bit support as I’m still migrating (way too many projects) and I’m already sick of this. All I want is to build. A very simple and basic command. The first one you use when you are building your application in order to be able to test it.

I just can’t believe this. Memory leak? COME ON!!!

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Delphi XE2 bug: nested option set depth limitation

February 8th, 2012

Some time ago I bumped into a very odd limitation on option sets (beside the bug I posted earlier). It’s about nested usage, when you have nested build targets, each with its own option set. You can see a more descriptive example in the stackoverflor post below:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8863041/delphi-xe2-option-set-nested-limit

I got to tell you, there are quite a lot of annoying bugs I keep bumping into with this XE2. I was so happy to see all the supported features that ease building so that I won’t have to write up complex batch files for it but bummer, they are buggy or don’t work at all.

The stupid thing is that if I modify one common file located some 10 packages up in the groupproject, I have to rebuild ALL the 10 packages, with ALL the 8-10 build targets.

Oh well, back to batch files.

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Delphi XE2 bug: build events not saved in option set

February 8th, 2012

As I’m working on a groupproject with a lot of projects each having a lot of (the same) build targets, I decided to go with option sets to have a good centralized control over things.
The surprise came when the build events didn’t work anymore the next day after I added them. Took me a little to figure out they were not saved. A little googling turned out he issue to be reported since well over a year on D2010. It’s “good” to see the bug to have gone by over 2 versions and a lot of updates.

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Delphi XE2 bug: build multiple targets

February 8th, 2012

When Building multiple targets on a project (like release and debug, in the same time (that is you select them all, shift select) and rightclick and then build, you will notice that the configurations used are those of the active configuration. So if you have the release active, then even though it builds the debug, it will do it with the release configurations (that includes option sets as well).
How to reproduce?
Have a project with multiple targets. Set different conditional defines in each (either directly or via option set, doesn’t matter), select them all, right click, and build. After the build, check the command line in the output and try not to curse. Took me about 2 hours to figure out why one of my projects was using a unit even though the conditional compiler directive was flagging to use another.

PS: if you think that using a build group saves you, surprise: it has the exact same bug.

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