Daz’s bits and bobs

What should I do after I successfully convert my virtual machine?

If you change from a multi-processor system to a uni-processor system you need to manually change the HAL on the Windows server after the conversion. To do this go into Device Manager after the machine first boots and discovers it’s new hardware and then click on Computer then right-click on the processor and select Update Driver. Then select Install from specific location and then Don’t search I will choose the driver to install. Then select show All compatible hardware and select the appropriate processor. For example, if you went from a dual cpu to a single cpu then select ACPI uni-processor PC instead of ACPI multi-processor PC. You will need to reboot once you change this. To verify what HAL you are using you right-click your hal.dll in c:\windows\system32 and select the Version tab and select Internal Name and it should say halmacpi.dll for multi-processor acpi and halacpi.dll for uni-processor acpi.

Next clean up all the non-present hardware after the P2V conversion. To do this go to a CMD prompt and type;

SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1 

DEVMGMT.MSC

then select Show Hidden Devices. Delete any old grayed out hardware. Next remove any vendor specific applications/drivers. For example on a HP server you should go to Add/Remove programs and remove any HP management agents, survey utility, array config utility, version control agent, etc. Also check your NIC and make sure there are no vendor specific drivers there (ie. teaming). Check the Services to see if all there is anything vendor specific related there and disable any services that are.

Read more…

these are tested from experience…. (the following is true on vmware server 1.0.6 on a linux host)

• Always use only 1 Virtual CPU – i have found that most times even if you have heaps of cores to spare on the host, a single virtual core is faster.
• Set the memory to the recommended level when possible – 256Mb sounds shit when you have 4gb, doesn’t matter – set it to 256Mb (increase only if excessive paging on the guest). Let linux and vmware manage the memory, in most cases it does a much better job than windows. Do not disable memory page trimming on any of the guests, this gives more memory back to the host to cache other more important activity (disk etc)
• Never use 2gb split files for the virtual disk unless you have to transfer the vm onto a file system that doesn’t support larger files.
• Load the latest drivers for your NIC on the host
• Be nice to your physical disk – do not load all your VM’s on a single drive – the HDD is the slowest part of the system, dont saturate it. I use either a raid 0 running multiple vm’s (with backups) or dedicated drives per set of vm’s. This excludes enterprise level raids which can handle much higher level of simultaneous requests.
• Install vmware tools on all guest machines

watch your pings – ping your guests… they should never loose a ping. If they do you are loading the cpu to high and the host cannot process the network queries. As above use only one virtual cpu. Also ensure you have the latest network driver loaded for your NIC on the host.

This is quite a handy app for creating small virtual routers. See the website for more detail… The commandline is similar to cisco – so its good for practice if you are going for your CCNA.

http://www.vyatta.com/products/virtualized.php

Oh – its open source and free!

I’m a bit lazy in most cases and just add a few virtual nics into my VM’s and do the routing though them. But some people may find this handy for a single point to manage networking.