Virtualization on Shane Cunningham

XenServer connect to Windows console

Sat, 07 Sep 2013 05:47:53 +0000

Connecting to a Linux console in XenServer is is easy as xl console, but slightly more difficult with a Windows VM since the terminal can’t display the Windows GUI. SSH tunneling and VNC to the rescue. First, grab the VNC port the Windows VM uses with the following command. You’ll need the dom-id of the Windows VM. xl list or xe vm-list name-label=YourWindowsNameLabel params=dom-id to find it.

console

xenstore-read /local/domain/dom-id/console/vnc-port
[root@xenserver ~]# xenstore-read /local/domain/31/console/vnc-port
5902

So the Windows VM has the console running on 127.0.0.1:5902. From your local machine we will need to setup an SSH tunnel to this port.

XenServer 6.2 and PCI passthrough for LSI SAS1068E

Mon, 01 Jul 2013 01:35:57 +0000

I had tried to passthrough my LSI SAS1068E to a virtual machine in XenServer 6.0 or 6.1, I forget, but I couldn’t get it working for some reason. I didn’t troubleshoot it very much though, a few Google searches seemed to point to my whitebox setup and driver/support issues. Recently, XenServer 6.2 was released so I thought I would try this again on my whitebox server. To my surprise I was able to get PCI passthrough working pretty easily on 6.2. For this setup I’m using a XenServer 6.2 host with a LSI SAS1068E card set to IT mode, so RAID is disabled and the card is JBOD, with Ubuntu Server 12.04 as the guest OS using the LSI card and being able to access the drives attached to it.

IPMI & iKVM issues with Java 7

Thu, 23 May 2013 05:40:38 +0000

Recently I made the mistake of turning off my 1U SuperMicro router running pfSense because we were going on a short vacation. Of course, when I came back and turned it back on I came across some nasty DMA disk errors and a read-only filesystem. No matter what I tried with fsck and remounting could fix these errors. I had my configs saved so I decided to just try a reinstall of pfSense 2.03. One cool thing about my SuperMicro board is the IPMI that’s built in. On my Mac I use IPMIview and the web interface IPMI provides to connect. Connecting with both worked fine, checking system status, all the power functions and iKVM worked for console redirection.

VM not sending hostname to DNS/DHCP server

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 07:23:18 +0000

On some VMs I spin up on ESXi the hostname is not sent to my DNS/DHCP server running in pfSense. Haven’t found exactly why because it seems occasionally Ubuntu VMs do send this correctly on first boot. I’m probably doing something not smart. Anyway, you can easily fix this problem by adding the following -

CentOS/Ubuntu
Add this to /etc/sysconfig/network

text

DHCP_HOSTNAME=hostname

Replace hostname with your servers hostname and restart networking. It should now send the hostname to your DNS/DHCP server.

Windows VM loses time sync

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 16:19:14 +0000

I experienced a weird time sync issue today with my Windows VMs. I went to stream something to my PS3 from a network share, but I received an error. I thought the share had just lost connection and I needed to reconnect it. When I tried that I received a couple errors, extended error or something and an error stating the time in Windows was different than the server I was trying to connect to. That’s when I noticed the date being reported was 9/12/12, which was 3 days behind. I logged into my DC and tried to sync with a couple Internet time servers, but those still resulted in a date that was 3 days behind. Manually changing the time and date resulted in Windows completely ignoring what I entered and going back to 9/12/12.

Adding local SATA drive to VM using RDM

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 14:01:35 +0000

My whitebox ESXi build did not go as well as I had hoped. Even though my ASUS M4A88T-M/USB3 motherboard has the IOMMU setting available under Secure Virtual Machine, it does not appear to work. Secure Virtual Machine should allow the motherboard and a compatible AMD-V CPU to passthrough devices directly to the VM using VMWare DirectPath I/O. I needed this since I have 2 x 2 TB hard drives with all of my data that I wanted to use for my fileserver VM. These drives already have data on them and I needed to pass them to the VM without putting any VMFS on the disks.

Hyper-V and CentOS

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 06:51:00 +0000

CentOS is not listed as a supported OS for Microsoft’s Hyper-V but I’ve found it works pretty well. Whenever I install CentOS on Hyper-V I forget the configuration file you have to create to get eth0 working. So here it is.

Install CentOS. Add legacy NIC in Hyper-V settings.

Create file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and input the following with your values of course.

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 ini

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=static
BROADCAST=192.168.0.255
IPADDR=192.168.0.100
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NETWORK=192.168.0.0
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
GATEWAY=192.168.0.1

Some other commands or config files that might need to be edited.

ESXi build

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 11:43:03 +0000

I ordered new RAM and motherboard for my ‘server’. Everything should be here by Thursday and I hope to load ESXi 4.1 on it to test.

CPU - Athlon II X4
RAM - 16GB DDR3 1333
MB - ASUS M4A88T-M/USB3 AM3
NICS - 2 x Intel Gigabit

Storage
1 x 640GB
2 x 1TB
2 x 2TB

Convert VMware Server 2 disks

Sat, 11 Sep 2010 15:36:50 +0000

Tested using .vmdk created in VMware Server 2, converted to .vhd and successfully ran in Microsoft Hyper-V R2. No settings to change unless you converted a Linux VM, probably will have to add legacy NIC driver to Hyper-V to get connectivity.

Vmdk2Vhd 1.0.13: 2/13/2006