Esx on sigtar.com

hyper-v to esx conversion

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +1200

V2V cold clone process for SBS / exchange / sql / DC’s etc….. (works in vSphere)

Steps to convert from hyper-v guest to vmware guest

Remove hyper-v integrated services while hyper-v guest is running. (if possible)
Note down NIC networking details first
Clean shutdown hyper-v guest
Use StarWind Converter (free) to convert VHD to “dynamically growing VMware” image and use “IDE” as type. Note “SCSI” does NOT work if you have not got the LSI / BUS drivers in the source image, just use the default options – dynamic vmware and IDE.
Create VMware guest shell (virtual machine equivalent to hyper-v specs but without the disks) – remove all hard drives, iscsi controller should also disappear.
Upload the VMDK to same data store as virtual machine and attach to the virtual guest in the right order. They should be detected as “IDE”
Start new vmware guest
If you could not remove integrated services (i.e. hot clone), then you MUST disable hyper-v services immediately.
Install vmware tools – reboot
Remove hidden NIC and other orphaned devices, and reconfigure network card as per original.
Windows may need to be re-activated - do this.

Note : converting a machine to use an IDE controller will limit its performance!

boot esx from usb drive

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +1300

Its quite easy to boot esx from a usb device or flash card..

First download the .iso, then browse with winrar or similar. See if you can find the “big”.dd file this is the file we need.

i.e. the ESXi 4 file is called VMware-VMvisor-big-208167-x86_64.dd

Next grab WinImage and “restore image to physical harddrive” choose the .dd file the select your usb / flash drive.

Done.

create usb install for esx / esxi

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +1300

First format your usb / flash drive with FAT. Then copy all the contents of the installer .iso onto the drive.

Next delete isolinux.bin and rename isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg

Edit syslinux.cfg and append “usb” to the line starting with “append” … i.e. similar to this

append vmkboot.gz — vmkernel.gz — sys.vgz — cim.vgz — ienviron.tgz — image.tgz — install.tgz usb

Next grab the latest syslinux.exe (zip for windows) from here and run syslinux -s –ma :

ESX 4 (vSphere) - installation issues

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +1200

I’ve had a couple of installation issues with ESX4

One was particularly strange, the install process would freeze every now and again until i pressed a key on the keyboard. This was related to AMD’s power saving C1 mode - disable this in the bios to fix this problem.

Secondly it was a problem with my nic. Essentially i didn’t have card that was supported (realtek). After inserting a intel card all was well. This fires up a ambiguous error and cans the whole install. (lvmdriver error)

Opensolaris : Citrix XenServer / ESX - Hooking into ZFS

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +1200

To share your zfs pool via NFS (that works with Citrix Xen / ESX) to a host called “esxhost”;

zfs set sharenfs=rw,nosuid,root=esxhost tank/nfs

Note : You MUST have a resolvable name from the opensolaris box. i.e. you should be able to ping it. I have tried with ip’s only and it will fail. I have edited the /etc/hosts file to include the following line for my config;