Posted by mattr on March 18, 2010 at 9:58 pm
VMware has so many new shiny gadgets it is sometimes easy to forget the simplicity it can add to an administrators life. One such example was a few weeks ago.
I was upgrading the memory in a Windows 2000 VM to 8GB, and had to alter the boot.ini to use more than 4GB. Unfortunately I was doing this remotely and during the save process my VPN died. When I rebooted the server I was faced with the dreaded ‘NTBTLDR.EXE is missing’. Now I knew that the problem must lie with the boot.ini, but how to get at it?
Because I was remote I did not have a Windows 2000 disk to get a recovery console up and I needed to get the server up and running again. I then realised that I did not need to boot from a CD to get to the VM’s hard drive.
I shut the VM off again, and jumped on to another server on the same host. In Edit Settings, I simply added the vmdk of the troubled host to the other machine and rescanned for the disk in Disk Management. Lo and behold the disk appeared and I could access the boot.ini file – I had managed to add a space at the beginning of the file during the save process which was causing the problem.
I rectified the file, removed the disk from the spare server and then the vmdk from the client. I crossed my fingers and restarted the VM … and gratefully saw the windows splash screen appear.
If this had been a physical box I would not have had a chance of fixing this remotely, and even on site there would have been much more time expended on finding a chassis with spare slots, array controller configurations etc. so it goes to show even the most basic functions of VMware are worth the effort of putting it in in the first place 
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Posted by mattr on May 26, 2009 at 9:56 pm
I have begun playing with the new vRanger 4 DPP Beta 2 to see how it compares with the current version and more importantly with the current rival Veeam 3.0.1.
Firstly it is important to note vRanger 4 is beta – there are bugs but the basics seem to work. I am not going to go into the differences between its predecessor – there are numerous major changes which you can check out at Vizioncore’s website.
However I thought I would just try a little test to see how vRanger and Veeam compare in a simple head to head backup.
I was using an HP Minitower with SATA drives as the backup server running both products – connecting to the same VMWare ESX 3.5 host (an HP DL380 G5 with local SAS disk). All were running 1Gb NICs.
The VM Guest being backed up was a 20GB Windows 2003 image – the results were as follows:
Vizioncore vRanger 4 DPP Beta 2
Time Taken : 17m2s
Backup Size : 4.9GB
Reported Throughput : 22MB/s
Veeam 3.0.1 (Set to Optimal compression)
Time Taken : 15m17s
Backup Size : 8.9GB
Reported Throughput : 22MB/s
Veeam 3.0.1 (Set to Best compression)
Time Taken : 14m6s
Backup Size : 8.9GB
Reported Throughput : 24MB/s
EDIT: After advice from Anton (see below reply) I recreated the job for the Best setting – the results were as below so Veeam still wins the race on speed / compression
Time Taken : 15m23s
Backup Size : 4.5GB
Reported Throughput : 22MB/s
I ran multiple tests for vRanger to ensure the same result and two different tests as noted above for Veeam as it had the option for altering the compression settings – ironically while this ‘Best’ function improved the speed of the backup the resulting file was the same size. Overall vRanger was acheiving compression of 75% versus Veeam’s 55% – it will be up to the individual to whether speed or size is most important.
So things are looking hopeful for vRanger at this stage although until a finished product is released there is no certainty what the final build will achieve. There are still quite a few glitches in the beta gui that need attention before it will be as clean as Veeam in terms of speed and usability.
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Posted by mattr on April 15, 2009 at 2:38 pm
I found this at the weekend – http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/vcmobileaccess
A mobile appliance that you can use to proxy access from your mobile device to your virtual centre server. Really cool and because it is aimed at mobile devices nice and quick even on GPRS.
Very useful for those of you on call
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