With the release of Power Pack 3 for Windows Home Server, I have been thinking about trying it out. Having an MSDN subscription and a virtual machine host made this quite a bit easier, as I didn’t need to purchase any additional hardware to use it.
Prior to installing WHS, I had a Windows 2008 virtual machine that I installed all my stuff on and had shares. It definitely worked, but some of the cool features of WHS kept me wanting to move in that direction. Things like automated backups of client machines, a console, better managed and accessible shares, and Media Center tie-ins (I have a Win7 virtual machine as a Media Center and an Xbox 360 as the extender). All in all, I think it is definitely going to be a move in the right direction, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t issues getting there. I am going to outline a bunch of them here in the hopes that others can find comfort in the work I have done to resolve them.
Just silly stuff like that, which take awhile to troubleshoot, when they don’t need to. Turn it off.
Protocol mismatch. This computer uses protocol version 6.0.2030.2, but partner computer [server] uses protocol version 6.0.2030.0. A connection cannot be established
This was because the http://server:55000/enrollid/id.aspx webservice that the connector uses on the WHS machine was returning the incorrect version. The only way to fix it that I found was by installing the final build of Power Pack 3. The beta didn’t work, nor did downgrading to a previous PP.
Hopefully this little guide helps someone else out there. As I tinker with it some more, I will probably add additional articles, but it is amazing how long it has taken me to get this silly machine up and running, especially when this is supposed to be an appliance. I know that MS is learning a lot from this, but the polish is still a bit missing, and this is after 3 Service Packs (Power Packs).
See the second update for the correct way of setting this up :)
You may be like me, and have a test lab running VI3. You may also only be running Microsoft VMs for whatever reason. I happen to be because that’s all I deal with as I work for a MS Consulting company. Anyways, whenever I wanted to create a new machine I needed to have the ISO copied out to the ESX storage device. This was always a pain because I’d have to use WinSCP or Filezilla to copy it from a host virtual machine to the storage device. Plus there was the fact that I was now using 2x the space on the storage device because it’s accessible to ESX and it’s stored in a VM. Lame.
With VI3 you can use NFS shares as storage devices. Downside is, is that by default Windows only uses CIFS (or SMB) sharing. However, with Windows 2003 R2 (you may be able to do it in Win2k3 too) you can install the Unix NFS tools which allows for the creation of NFS shares.
From the Windows machine you want the NFS share(s) located on, you need to open Add/Remove Programs from the Control Panel and then Add the following Windows components. Under Other Network File and Print Services select to install all of the Microsoft Services for NFS. I don’t think if you need all of them, but it’s working with them all (feel free to leave feedback if you play).
After you install those, it will require a reboot. Once you’re back up, open up the Microsoft Services for NFS in the Administrator Tools. Right click on the root (Microsoft Services for NFS) and select the user name mapping you want. I set mine to AD lookup, but I’m using anonymous read only access on the share anyways.
If the CIFS share has already been created, you will need to create the NFS share from the command line. This can be done with the following command: nfsshare -o anon=yes
=drive:path. Obviously replace
with the name you like and drive:path with the location for the share.
If the CIFS share hasn’t already been created, then you will see a NFS Sharing tab when you attempt to create the share.
Once the share has been created, within your VirtualCenter client (or host based VI Client), select the host, go to configuration tab, and then Storage (SCSI, SAN, and NFS). Select Add Storage and select the Network File System option. Enter the info for the server you just set this up on and the folder (/
). Now you have a mounted storage device for your share. Yay!
As mentioned before, this NFS mount point can be a virtual machine on the host. I haven’t restarted the host yet, so I’m not sure how nicely it plays with that though.
Resources used for this:
http://levelsofdetail.kendeeter.com/2007/01/setting_up_an_nfs_server_on_wi.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324089
**Update**
Ugh, so just doing the above doesn’t work. At least it didn’t list the contents of the iso directory. No good. Further research comes up with one possible solution, but it’s ugly.
Add anonymous login read access to the share and ntfs permissions on the share. This seems to work, but I’m not really a fan of it. For some reason, user mapping doesn’t seem to be working. You should be able to do user mapping by grabbing the /etc/passwd and /etc/group files from your VI3 host and then importing them into the Microsoft Services for NFS User Name Mapping section (right click and define the location for these two files).
I’ve mapped the local admin to the root account. I get no love though as soon as I disable anonymous access on the NFS share. Boo. What really makes me angry is that I want to host templates on this Windows NFS share. That would require me to enable read/write access to the anonymous user. Needless to say, something I’m really not comfortable with. Maybe I can fix this stupid user mapping issue, and then I won’t have to worry.
Oh yeah, be sure to enable the NFS client firewall rule on your host…
**Update #2** This is the way to get this setup
Alright, I’m retarded as to why I couldn’t get this figured out. The real steps to get this going:
I really want to upgrade to ESX 3.5. However, I’m not having that much luck with it. I’ve tried 2x now, and have had the exact same experience. So, I do the upgrade from 3.0.2 to 3.5.0. However, after the upgrade, not all of my VMs function. Some of them work just fine. However, others are sitting at the command prompt saying that no OS has been found. It’s weird because the drives are attached and recognized, but it doesn’t like to boot from them. It’s like it can’t find the MBR.
Things I’ve tried to fix this:
I really don’t know what to do at this point. I know that I can downgrade again to 3.0.2 and it will work fine. The machines will boot right up without issues. However, to downgrade, that means I have to recreate all of my Virtual Machines again. Not completely awful, but time consuming. I may try to do a full install instead of any upgrade too, see if that works. Any other ideas?
I’d really like to move to 3.5 as it has some nice features. Plus I’ll be sitting the VCP class soon, which will be on 3.5.
Leostream, who I’ve talked about before, has a few new demo’s up on their website. Having used some of the demoed software before, these are pretty well done. I would definitely take a look at them. Oh, and it doesn’t seem to work in IE7 beta, and there are other people saying it doesn’t work in IE at all, so break out firefox or something else to check em out.
Today was the official announcement of VI3, VMWare’s next release of ESX and Virtual Center. After watching the webcast this morning, I’m more than a little bit stoked.
Some of the things I’m looking forward to are
I can’t wait to get the final bits loaded on my machine. I’ve actually been debating installing beta 2 on my home machine for awhile, but haven’t because of time constraints. However, I’ll have to put a few things on hold to install the final version.
There are also a few new whitepapers on VI3 already on VMWare’s website, so you can get a head start before it’s actually released.