Dave's Virtual Cave

VMWare Converter and Vmdk2Vhd are now playing nicely

2007-02-13T22:54:00Z

As a few folks on our forums have noted, there was a problem getting VMDK's produced via VMWare Converter to be read into our Vmdk2Vhd tool. Well, I'm happy to report that we found the issue and Vmdk2Vhd is now converting those now without issue. The download has been updated to version 1.0.13, so grab an updated copy and give it a try.

The big holdup in getting through this problem was actually getting VMWare Converter to just do it's job so we'd have something to test against. After spending what seemed to be like forever testing a number of different machines we finally came across one laptop that would actually P2V correctly. I guess there are a number of users having problems and the strange thing is that these problems seemed to crop up somewhere between beta and release. Regardless, we made it through and got Vmdk2Vhd updated and all is well on the playground once again.. for a few seconds at least.

JumpBox Virtual Appliance running on Virtual Server in 5 minutes

2006-12-01T20:32:00Z

Looking through the daily RSS feeds I caught a post on http://www.virtualizationdaily.com about a new VMWare partner named JumpBox. Taking a minute to look through JumpBox's site I came across this statement in their FAQ

"Currently JumpBox supports Xen, Parallels and VMware - the three most popular virtualization platforms."

These kind of statements make me chuckle as they are funny on so many levels. Even though JumBox doesn't consider Microsoft to be a player in the Virtualization space, I wanted point out how easy it is to get these Virtual Appliances running inside of Virtual Server (or VPC).

Since the Virtual Appliance that JumpBox offers is built on Ubutu linux it has everything necessary to be compatible with the Virtual Server enviornment. All we have to do is get the drives converted into a format that VS can read.

What you need:

The JumpBox vTiger Virtual Appliance: http://www.jumpbox.com/download-vtiger/
A machine running Microsoft Virtual Server (I used Virtual Server 2005 R2)
The vmToolkit Vmdk2Vhd Converter

Steps:

Expand the vTiger-0.5.tar file (WinRar or tar)
Run the Vmdk2Vhd converter on the three vmdk files (root.vmdk, swap.vmdk and var.vmdk) nameing the files to root.vhd, swap.vhd and var.vhd in a new folder of your choosing.
If your not already there, copy these three files to the machine running Virtual Server into a folder (make note of the folder)
Open the Virtual Server admin website and Create a new VM called vTiger in folder where you copied the three new .vhd files. Use 256mb of RAM and assign the first IDE harddrive to the root.vhd file.
Edit the configuration of the new VM and add the two more virtual harddrives swap.vhd to Primary Channel (1) and var.vhd to Secondary channel (1).
You should end up with something that looks like:

Thats all there is. Turn that VM and enjoy. Fact is there are quite a few of these types of Virtual Appliances out there that run just fine on platforms other than the one(s) they are advertised for. It's just a matter of getting them into acceptable formats for your selected virtual platform.

btw. The vTiger Virtual Appliance looks to be a great CRM solution. I'd highly recommend checking it out regardless of the platform you use.

Have Fun.

My cave gets a virtual addition

2006-11-14T21:18:00Z

Always being the one who gets the "they don't let him out of his cave very often" statement about him, I was excited when the powers that be at Xcarab asked me to start a blog here for the vmToolkit project. Being one of their dev's working with various Virtualization projects in one form or fashion for the past few years, they wanted to expose you to the dev's side of things as it relates to Virtualization platforms. For me, I'm really looking forward to seeing some of our tools and ideas get released to the community at large.

So, welcome to my area of this project. Hang out, fire off some questions and be a part of the action.