Well, I have downloaded the (Wordpress for BlackBerry) app from BlackBerry App World. Setup was painless, especially the nice notice that XML-RPC was disabled on my blog which made it very easy to fix and connect up. So far only issue is getting geotagging / location information, the BlackBerry GPS is of course not so great indoors..
So, this is my first post from the BlackBerry!
VMware Consolidate Backup (VCB) 1.5 U2 was released March 11, 2010. Release notes here. The release looks to be only fixes / resolved issues. Most (all?) known issues remain, didn’t take a look at it in depth.
Since data protection vendors are starting to release vStorage API for Data Protection products (Veeam Backup & Replication, Symantec NetBackup 7), VCB would likely begin to be phased out in many environments. Not that the vStorage API is a replacement for VCB as such, but it could be a good fit in many environments.
This is my first look at the current release of converter (4.0.1), release notes here. Some of the new features in this version include support for Windows Server 2008 and RHEL, Ubuntu and SUSE, also a few good things around hot cloning.
The conversion I’m doing was of a Windows Server 2003 Ent 32-bit physical server running on an HP DL380 G5 into a VM running on vSphere 4.0 U1, virtual hardware version 7. The process is almost identical to the previous cold clone version, the livery has been changed to reflect vSphere and vCenter in all the relevant places but it flowed the same. As with all conversions, it’s a good idea to prepare the server before conversion by disabling hardware agents (e.g. HP Insight Agents) and anything not absolutely necessary for the server to boot the first couple of times
Two good things: firstly configuring network settings seemed more robust (could be just me). I’d had problems with the previous version of the cold clone image where the network settings either didn’t take or would for whatever reason just not connect. Secondly, the conversion of this particular server was really fast. The server itself had two very small disks but both were resized (72GB partition into a 20GB partition and a ~570GB partition into a tiny 10GB partition), but the process did seem to run much faster than previous servers of similar size that I’ve converted with the old cold clone CD.
Only one odd thing with the end result was the amount of memory the virtual machine was assigned. The server itself had 4GB physical memory of which Windows sees 3.75GB. The virtual machine was allocated 3220MB during he creation process, not sure why this would happen.
Installing a new SQL Server 2005 instance that requires SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS collation sequence at the server level. This is the install default if the server’s Regional Settings are English (United States) – this particular server wasn’t. Found plenty of information online regarding changing the server collation sequence but the exact process escaped me. Below is really just about formatting the command but may help someone…
To change the server level collation, a rebuild of system databases is required. Do this by running setup.exe (the installer) from the command line. The following command from Books Online (search for ‘run setup from command prompt’) is exactly what is required:
start /wait
Note the
The /qn switch which is for msiexec. It will run the setup process with no UI, it could also run with /qb, probably just as fine.
While fixing up storage pathing through redundant FC adapters, noticed that one ESX 4.0 U1 host using Fixed (VMware) path selection policy had an Active (I/O) path for each presented LUN but did not have a Preferred adapter highlighted. Also, received the following error when trying to set the preferred adapter (under Datastore Properties -> Manage Paths -> right-click in Paths, select Preferred):
Unable to cast object of type ‘LogicalUnitPolicy’ to type ‘FixedLogicalUnitPolicy’
This was only happening on one host and was happening for every datastore and every type of storage presented to the host (local and remote).
To fix, selected the only local storage presented to this host (where ESX was installed) and briefly changed the Path Selection Policy to Most Recently Used (VMware), which causes a Set logical unit policy action on the host. After doing so and then switching back to Fixed (VMware), the preffered path is then highlighted and the other LUN’s were able to be successfully set as well.
I expect that a rescan of the storage adapters may also resolve it but didn’t get the chance to try it.
