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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Virtualization Megathread V2: VMs inside VMs
 
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necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost

FISHMANPET posted:

I just started reading the Scott Lowe book, and in chapter 2 he talks about PXE booting all your ESXi hosts from your vCenter server, but in that situation I have no idea how you could pull it off with a virtual vCenter. How do you boot up from nothing when your boot server lives on a virtual server that can't boot?

Very chicken & the egg stuff here...
You'd have to assign a special boot image for the cluster containing a vCenter VM and only permit one machine to ever boot from it at a time (that much I haven't seen an option for besides MAC address filtering for images, which then introduces a MAC address dependency in your recovery sequence). If your entire system goes down, you need a defined sequence anyway and one way of breaking the dependency is to just say "the chicken starts from this special, unique egg" or vice versa. In software parlance, this is basically a singleton.

A comedy option is to have a physical server around to function as a temporary vCenter that gets a p2v run on it in the event things go to hell. But I assume that if any of this is necessary, you'd probably be better off spending time dusting off your resume than restoring all the equipment.

* # ¿ Feb 29, 2012 18:56
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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 01:29
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necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost

Martytoof posted:

From a guest's perspective, should it be able to discern a difference between being powered on in (for example) VMware Fusion versus VMware Workstation versus ESXi 5?

I mean that in the sense of installing a VM on Fusion 4 with compatibility set to the latest featureset, then copying the vmdk, vmx, and subsequent support files to a Linux machine running Workstation 8, should the power on on the new platform be seamless for the guest OS or can I expect some hardware changes to be detected?
The virtual hardware is different (no VMXNet 3 on Fusion or Workstation) and VMX files are different slightly across the hypervisors with the VM loaders checking that you didn't just copy-paste VMs around. The disk modes available are not the same as on ESX either for VMDKs, particularly if you're doing stuff like RDMs (say, boot camp VMs with Fusion). For the sake of correctness, I'd use Converter each time even if I knew all the differences off the top of my head.

* # ¿ Mar 16, 2012 19:44
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necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost

Erwin posted:

I think some of their UI messages are written by high school interns:



"Oh some file or directory stuff is happening. You know, like some things, man."
More likely it's some outsourced developer that doesn't speak / read / write English as a native language. I'll be damned if I could come up with good error messages in Chinese or Romanian.

* # ¿ Apr 11, 2012 22:11
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Virtualization Megathread V2: VMs inside VMs