HTC Please Fix My Meeting Problems

Posted on July 10, 2010 by admin

HTC ticket: 10USD280004784 – Meeting acceptance responses sent from HTC Evo to Exchange 2003 / Outlook 2003 show as being sent from the incorrect user. This occurs when when the user accepts a meeting invite and chooses not to “Edit the response”. When a user makes a note within their acceptance response, the acceptance reply appears properly to the meeting creator. The EVO shown in the clip is mine (Brian Fitzhugh). When I accept without a note in the body, my response shows as being from the wrong invitee. When I place a note in the response body, it sees the the response as being from the correct invitee.

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Domain Controllers, Virtual Machines, and Time

Posted on February 26, 2010 by admin

Some quick notes on creating virtual domain controllers:

  • Don’t P2V domain controllers. Build clean VM’s, DC promo them, trasfer roles, and setup GC’s as needed.
  • For none xDC VM’s disable the Windows Time service and check the host time sync box in the vm’s vmtools.
  • If snapshots are taken of a DC VM, don’t revert back to that snapshot (at least in a production environment)
  • Don’t allow the PDC emulator VM to sync its time to an external time source. It should rely on the vmtools for its time. To do this:
  1. Stop the “Windows Time” service
  2. Drill down to HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Parameters\ Edit the “Type” string to NoSync
  3. Open VMware tools and check the box for “Time synchronization between the virtual machine and the host operating system”
  4. Start the “Windows Time” service

VMware KB Link

Posted in Technology, Virtualization, Windows | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

vSphere Client on Linux: Update

Posted on February 5, 2010 by

In an update of a previous post (vSphere Client on Linux) I was having trouble getting tsclient to except custom resolutions so I rewrote the launcher to execute the following:

rdesktop -u bfitzhugh -p -n virtualcenter.hostname.local -g 1680x995 -s 'c:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\VpxClient.exe' -D

Launching the vSphere client using the rdesktop statement above allows me tweak the resolution to just the right dimensions and be able to maintain my top and bottom panels.

Posted in Linux | Leave a comment

vSphere DPM and Templates

Posted on February 4, 2010 by

I’ve never liked the disconnect between power management (DPM) and some of the other features built into vSphere 4. One of the more aggravating situations occurs when a host hosting templates and powered down VM’s goes into standby. When this occurs you lose the ability to deploy servers from your templatized VM’s. The same situation occurs with VM’s that are powered off. They become a hostage on the suspended host.

I’ve come up with a simple workaround. Since templates and powered down VM’s aren’t consuming any host resources you can usually be assured that they are going to stay were you put them. In other words, they aren’t going to drift around as DRS does its job. With this in mind, I’ve excluded one host from participating in DPM while keeping the remainder active. You can do this by:

Right clicking on your cluster -> Edit Settings… -> VMware DRS -> Power Management -> Host Options

Select the host that you want to keep running (that will house your powered off VM’s and templates) and click the “Power Management” column for that host. Select Disable and click OK. If you have DPM configured for automatic, the remaining hosts should still reflect the “Default (Automatic)” setting under the “Power Management column”. The last step is to migrate your powered down VM’s and templates to the DPM disabled host.

With this done, you should now be able to reliably deploy VM’s from templates and continue to allow DPM manage the power status of the remaining hosts.

Posted in Virtualization | Leave a comment

Saving Space With ZFS and Virtual Machines

Posted on February 1, 2010 by

In my last post I ran a little test where I copied a few ISO’s over to the test server to see how the deduplication process worked on ZFS. I’ve continued that testing, and copied a few virtual machines up to the same lab server. To make things a bit more interesting I’ve enabled ZFS compression as well.

Let’s take a look at the data we’re working with:

VMware VMDK’s

  • Virtual Machine 1 has a single disk that is about 12GB
  • Virtual Machine 2 has a single disk that is about 10GB

Virtual Box Hard Disks

  • 10GB of Virtual Box hard disk’s

So the plan is to create folders 1-4. Folders 1 and 2 will hold duplicate copies of the VMware VMDK files, and folders 3 and 4 will hold duplicate copies of the Virtual Box hard disk files. The the raw uncompressed undedup’ed data total should be about 64GB. Let’s look at the before and after upload results:

Before Upload

  • zpool list rpool
NAME    SIZE  ALLOC   FREE    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
rpool   696G  7.78G   688G     1%  1.02x  ONLINE  -
  • zfs get compressratio rpool/data
NAME        PROPERTY       VALUE  SOURCE
rpool/data  compressratio  1.0x  -

After Upload

  • zpool list rpool
NAME    SIZE  ALLOC   FREE    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
rpool   696G  13.6G   682G     1%  2.07x  ONLINE  -
  • zfs get compressratio rpool/data
NAME        PROPERTY       VALUE  SOURCE
rpool/data  compressratio  1.71x  -

If we take a look further we can see that df reports about 17GB of disk space used:

df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rpool/data            686G   17G  670G   3% /rpool/data

If we contrast the zpool list results it appears that our 64GB of data has consumed about 6GB of actual disk space. Not bad.

Although this setup warrants further testing (and inclusion in a supported OpenSolaris release), these results should give us a bit of insight into how ZFS dedup and compression will handle our data when we use it as a backup target for our virtualized data.

Posted in Storage, Technology, Virtualization | Leave a comment