Duncansapien’s Techblog

Overview

The plan is to create a complete test environment for Active Directory inside VMware Workstation 6.5. To replicate as closely as possible a real-world scenario, existing Linux-based DNS servers will be used. When AD is installed, the first Windows Server will also act as a DNS server but only for AD - forwarding queries to the existing Linux servers for all non-AD queries.

The environment we want to construct is as follows:

Network

• VMNet1 - Private network shared with host, network 192.168.19.0 used for 99% of work
• VMNet8 - NAT, used infrequently to obtain Microsoft updates and software packages (BIND) from internet then disconnected, network 192.168.85.0.

DNS

• 2 x Suse 10.3 DNS guest servers (primary, secondary)
  dns1.mydept.myorg, 192.168.19.201
  dns2.mydept.myorg, 192.168.19.202
  

Windows Servers (to host AD, network shares, etc)

• 2 x Windows Server 2003 Standard guests
  w2k03-a.mydept.myorg, 192.168.19.5
  w2k03-b.mydept.myorg, 192.168.19.6
  

XP hosts (to login to AD)

• 2 x XP SP3 guests
  xp-a.mydept.myorg, 192.168.19.10
  xp-b.mydept.myorg, 192.168.19.11
  

Why Suse 10.3, you might wonder? Simply because from a previous exercise I have a dual-booting XP and OpenSuse 10.3 VM available, sharing a small (8Gb) virtual hard disk and this seems ideal.

Figure 1: The Active Directory Test Environment

First Steps: The DNS Servers

We wish to establish a Suse 10.3 VM with the BIND DNS package, re-using a VM from earlier work (see “Dual-booting XP with Suse 10.3“).

The following references will be used: Quick HOWTO: Configuring DNS

We want to rename the Suse machine and see which services are in use, along the way installing the nanoemacs editor for convenience.

Boot the Suse10.3 VM and open a command shell

Article being written, but aren’t these colours nice?

Overview

VMware ESX3i is now a free product, comparable to the ESX software.

Quick Facts

• One can evaluate both ESX and ESX3i inside Workstation 6.5 - see "Running VMware ESX 3.5 and ESXi in Workstation" (great video blog)

• One can convert Workstation 6.x files to ESX3i format and upload them to the ESXi server from within the VMware Converter Software - see Carl Tyler’s Blog for an excellent screen-capture based guide on all this.

Overview

VMware Desktop Infrastructure has changed to View 3

Read more at http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2231693/vmware-view-enhances-virtual

Further VMware Product names changes have been made, see http://www.vmware.com/support/product_renaming.html 

Overview

Just some jotting from a recent meeting. Considerations for hosting a maximum of 20 VMs, all running Windows 2000, all with 8Gb storage maximum = 160Gb. Additionally, require space for 7x daily backup (7×160Gb = 1120Gb usable space).

SAN

• SAS disks are basically as good, in throughput, as FC disks.
• SATA disks noticably slower than SAS, not advised for anything other than backup use, certainly not as home drives for users, for example.
• Dell MD3000i used with iSCSI and ESX3.x no problem. Price?
• NetAPP FS2000 series is lowest with iSCSI availability (FAS Series Overview). Costs - the FAS270 may be around US$20,000 … oh dear, well that ends that thread then!
• SANDirect web site has great, easy-to-view information on many SANs for a quick comparison of features.
• The Intel® Storage Server SSR212MC2 may also be of interest, need to check out further.
• Evolution Rack Server - popular in the University, check out the model A60.
• RAID 6 popular with large disk size, protects against failure of two disks (long rebuild time with larger disks).

This article, "Things we wish we’d known about NAS devices and Linux
Raid", discusses RAID failure probabilities and is, frankly, superb.

Overview

In a classroom environment, there is a need to run 10-15 VMs based around Windows 2000. Can the freeware VMware Server handle this many concurrent VMs?

Investigation

For a Languages classroom we need to run multiple VMs. We could give each student an 8Gb USB pen drive and install VMware Player on the classroom PCs, but they would lose it. The classroom PCs are well-secured and a number of software packages just will not run in a multi-user environment, and require one VM per student. VMware ESX is under investigation but for various reasons, political, internal change, finance etc, it will not be possible to have this online in time for the classes.

VMware - Limitations

• This article reports VMware Workstation running 21 XP-based VMs concurrently on a beefy server, so it should be possible.
• This article reports that running 15-16 VMs on Windows Server 2003 host causes problems.
• This excellent article advises using Centos as the host OS and running 4-6 Vms per physical CPU core.

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