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Extending a Windows Server 2008 startup volume

By on June 12, 2010 in efficiency, Virtualization

No no, I haven’t converted to the “other side”, but I had the need to extend my Windows Server 2008 VMWare image from 20GB to 40GB. Extending the virtual disk was a piece of cake (thanks to VMWare) but extending the disk on Windows Server 2008 was kinda “difficult” until I found the following description.

The reason why you can not simply extend the startup volume of your Windows server is that it won’t allow you to extend the startup volume in the GUI tool of the Administration under the disk management application. Fortunately, the engineers added this option in the command line tool “diskpart” since Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2. These versions of Windows ship with a more enhanced version of diskpart.exe that supports partition extension for bootable disks.

In order to extend your startup volume you have to do the following;

Open a Command Prompt and type: diskpart

Type: list volume

Remember the volume number (#) of your volume!

Type: select volume (the number from the above step)

Type: extend

This is it and you don’t even have to reboot. How about that for a change :-)

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VMWare ESX(i) Could not power on…

By on April 7, 2009 in Virtualization

We run most of our servers on some sort of virtual environment. Be it XEN or VMWare ESX(i). This has proofed to be a very cost effective way to fully leverage each machine’s CPU and RAM.

In any case, the other day we had to adjust some RAM settings for one of the virtual servers. After setting the RAM and restarting the machine we got an error message saying;

“Could not power on vm: no space left on device”

You can imagine, that we were totally shocked as this was a customer server and time was running out. So, the only cause of this could be that VMWare must have some problems with the expanded RAM.

As it turns out, the solution to this was quite simple. VMWare adjusts the SWAP file and in our case, there was no more space left on the drive that this virtual machine was running on. So, if you are prompted with this message you should go into the general server configuration and adjust the SWAP location. Then adjust it as well in your individual virtual machine environment.

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New VMWare Update lets you import your Parallels virtual machines

By on February 14, 2009 in Virtualization

My favorite virtual machine provider, just released an update to it already perfect application. The new version brings the capability to import virtual machines that you might have created with Paralells 4.x. See the video below how easy it is.

Also, they apparently fixed a bug with the Shared Folders feature that would add a lag to it. Among other things they also fixed some issues with Leopard Server and installation on the new MacBook Pro. Thought I never had a problem at all.

But the coolest addition is that Ubuntu 8.10 is now fully supported! This means, the VMWare tools are 100% supported and Unity View works now again. They posted another video on this here.

Very cool. You can download VMWare Fusion over at their dedicated website.

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How to update a ESXi server

By on January 27, 2009 in Virtualization

All of my servers run a flavor of a virtual infrastructure. Most popular is probably the VMWare ESX and ESXi series. Especially, the ESXi offering is a freely available virtualization platform that allows you to host virtual machines hassle free.

So, with any offering there has to be some distinction between the paid offering and the free offering (unless you have open source software, hint hint) and so the ESXi platform is no exception to the game. Still it is a great offering. So, what do you have to do to upgrade to the latest release or available patches?

VMWare provides the VMware Infrastructure Client that can be run (unfortunately only) on Windows. While installing you should choose to install everything, because then there is also the VMware Infrastructure Update installed. With it, is is a breeze upgrade/update your ESXi servers.

The steps are;

  1. Choose Start > Programs > VMware > VMware Infrastructure Update.
  2. On the Hosts tab, select the ESXi hosts to check for updates.
  3. On the Updates tab, click Check Now.
  4. Install the Update. This will download the Updates and Patches. With some it takes a looooong time.
  5. Once downloaded it will prompt for you authentication and install the update.
  6. If needed, reboot the ESXi host machine.

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