Category Archives: IT

OVF Exports from VMware Products

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An OVF is a portable container for VMs that allows for easy import into a virtualization platform, like the VMware suite of products.

It seems like a no-brainer task to make one, you just highlight the VM in vCenter, click on file –> export, easy peasy.

This process is slow, prone to error and isn’t very flexible.  There is a very elegant, if non-gui centric way of accomplishing this seemingly easy task.

OVF Tool

It is a great little command utility that takes a couple arguments (target, destination) and out comes a VM or OVF/OVA file.   It is supported under Windows and Linux and provides reliable functionality for your OVF import/export needs.

Tool Syntax:

c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware OVF Tool>ovftool –help examples
Source Locator Examples:

c:\ovfs\my_vapp.ovf

c:\vms\my_vm.vmx

vi://username:pass@localhost/my_datacenter/vm/    \
my_vms_folder/my_vm_name

Destination Locator Examples:

c:\ovfs\my_vapp.ovf

c:\vms\my_vm.vmx

vi://username:pass@localhost/my_datacenter/host/    \
esx01.example.com
vi://username:pass@localhost/my_datacenter/host/    \
esx01.example.com/Resources/my_resourcepool

Note: the /host/ and /Resources/ part of the above inventory path are fixed and must be specified when using a vi destination locator.  The /Resources/ part is only used when specifying a resource pool.

Examples:

ovftool -tt=vmx c:\ovfs\my_vapp.ovf c:\vms\
(.ovf file to .vmx file. Result files will
be: c:\vms\my_vapp\my_vapp.[vmx|vmdk])

ovftool c:\vms\my_vm.vmx c:\ovfs\my_vapp.ovf
(.vmx file to .ovf file. Result files will be c:\ovfs\my_vapp.[ovf|vmdk])

ovftool http://my_ovf_server/ovfs/my_vapp.ova c:\vms\my_vm.vmx
(.ova file to .vmx file)

ovftool c:\ovfs\my_vapp.ovf vi://username:pass@my_esx_host
(.ovf file to ESX host using default mappings)

ovftool c:\ovfs\my_vm.vmx vi://username:pass@my_esx_host
(.vmx file to ESX host using default mappings)

ovftool https://my_ovf_server/ovfs/my_vapp.ovf \
vi://username:pass@my_esx_host
(.ovf file from a web server to ESX host using defaults)

ovftool c:\ovfs\my_vapp.ovf \
vi://username:pass@my_vc_server/?ip=10.20.30.40
(.ovf file to vCenter server using managed ESX host ip address)

ovftool “vi://username:pass@my_vc_server/my_datacenter?ds=\
[Storage1] foo/foo.vmx” c:\ovfs\
(VM on ESX/vCenter server to OVF using datastore location query)

ovftool c:\ovfs\my_vapp.ovf \
vi://username:pass@my_vc_server/my_datacenter/host/my_host
(.ovf file to vCenter server using vCenter inventory path)

ovftool vi://username:pass@my_host/my_datacenter/vm/my_vm_folder/my_vm_name \
c:\ovfs\my_vapp.ovf
(VC/ESX vm to .ovf file)

ovftool https://my_ovflib/vm/my_vapp.ovf
(shows summary information about the OVF package [probe mode])

\End Tool Syntax

The syntax for this tool is grueling.  I started out trying to a do a datastore query export and gave up, I ended up using the folder method.  It took me *36* attempts to get it to work.  You can view the folder structure by looking at the VM and Template view in vCenter.  The syntax is case sensitive and you need the “quotes” for when you have a open space in the command, much like other command line entries.  Also, the “\” in the examples seems to be VMwares way of saying you need a space there, putting that in the actual line throws an error.

Good luck!

–Nat

If I post this here, I will be motivated

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Anandtech is looking for writers – I’ve been an incredibly faithful reader of this site since I went to college back in the fall of 2002 and it would be a dream come true in a literal sense if even once I was able to get an article on there.  Even more awesome than making the front page of Slickdeals.net wight my first deal posting.

What I plan on writing in order to submit for this position are:

  • A review on the powerline network adapters I bought from woot.com right before the new year.
  • A “how to” on how to P2V a XP machine with all free software.   This is a useful approach for a number of reasons.
  • An opinion piece on something.   Probably the current state of XBMC and how it can be useful and where it seems to come up short.
  • Some new “news blog” posts and a mix in of some of the posts I have already published.

There it is, out in the open.  I have pretty much psyched myself out of even trying to do this – but I owe it to myself to give it a shot.

Wish me luck.

–Nat

An hour of my day.

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This sounds like basic functionality to me – the ability to export a VM from Hyper-V into a single file for mobility/delivery.

10:00 am – logged into SCVMM to perform the task.  Couldn’t find it.

10:10 am – typed “export” into the help console.  Nothin’ – I don’t care about exporting reports.  I want *vm* related help.

10:20 am – Google-fu hit paydirt – except this most only pertain to Hyper-V in plain 2008.

10:30 am – Technet Hyper-V forum, let the fun begin.

10:55 am – realize you need to actually log in to one of the Hyper-V servers directly and run the Hyper-V manager.  Evidently the central console doesn’t have this functionality.

10:56 am – queue some reading about GUIDS & such pertinent to Hyper-V exporting.

10:57 am – decided to just export a VM to see what happens.

10:59 am – realize there is no local space to drop the exported files.  Need to map a drive or something to make this work…

11:00 am – lunch.  Tasty.

–Nat

Adblock Plus, you rock…

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There are some pretty annoying advertisements out there.  Facebook is annoying enough since the whole right pane of the page is ads.  Other sites like Dailytech are worse with their “Vibrant” advertising, where the popups come when you mistakenly move your cursor over highlighted text.  There is a simple remedy to get rid of this crud when using Firefox, and its name is Adblock Plus.

  1. Install the latest version of Firefox from www.mozilla.org
  2. Open Tools –> Add-ons
  3. Click “Get Add-ons”
  4. Type “adblock plus” into the search box
  5. Click “Add to Firefox”
  6. Click through the installation
  7. You’ll have to restart Firefox
  8. *Important* – now you actually have to enable Adblock Plus
  9. Open Tools –> Add-ons
  10. Under extensions, you’ll see Adblock Plus, click “options”
  11. Open Filters –> Add filter subscription
  12. I’ve been using the first one, Easylist USA, make sure you hit “apply”
  13. Under options, make sure Adblock Plus is enabled
  14. Viola, all done!
It just works...

All the usual garbage on the right is gone.

Do you have any awesome browser extensions you’d like to share?  Leave feed back below 🙂

–Nat

Zune Update 4.2

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Running Windows update with the Zune software installed gets you a little point release upgrade.  Ars Technica is all excited about how this software added some mysterious phone support.  Myself, I am thrilled that xvid, avi, and divx are all recognized by the player!  Even though they have to be re-encoded to work on the Zune, they now show up in the library and the re-encode is handled natively by the Zune software which uses at least two cores and seems to give good audio/video quality.  Previously, I had to re-encode all the crap from the internet into .mp4 or .wmv manually and separately.  This additional codec support is going to be a huge time and effort saver for me.  Evidently the Zune HD will play these files back natively in the future, which would be perfect.  With anyluck, they’ll support .mkv files in the next few months too, totally eliminating all that messy manual re-encoding 🙂

Which, incidentally, brings me to the big new iPad.  Its codec support is pretty sucktastic and speaks to how tightly integrated it will have to be with iTunes to get crap onto that device.  It really is just a big iPod touch…  it gets less and less cool the more I think about it.

I would take a 7″ Zune HD for $300 though :p  (Please, Kristin?)

–Nat

Fun with Update Manager

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After having a mornings worth of issues troubleshooting an error in vCenter Update Manager, I stumbled across a great blog entry that had the answer.  After we had a server (the server I am trying to patch, ironically) act up and give some VM’s fits, our first reaction was to bring it up to date with patches.  Update Manager wouldn’t do anything but scan hosts for baseline compliance, which makes patching pretty difficult.

First, I restarted the Update Manager service without any change.  Next, I followed the above blogs guidance and unregistered some orphaned VM’s.  Even though the server I was having issues with didn’t have any VM’s on it and was in maintenance mode, this seems to have turned the trick.

Now if I could only find the Update Manger logs in Server 2008…

–Nat

Creative Gigaworks S700, RIP

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It was a sad day yesterday when I realized that my amp had perished on my prized set of PC speakers.  The Creative Gigaworks was a primo set from 2005, boasting 560 watts RMS of power (probably not really…), 5.1 sound with very solid 8″ subwoofer and remote control to accompany its THX certification.  They were very nice, and they were also $350+.

Perhaps the sad thing is that I should be happy they lasted so long, threads like this one are easy to find with google.  There is evidently a 105 page thread about the failures of these units on Creative’s support forums.  Evidently the glue they pasted over the internal wiring of the amp/subwoofer turned out to be conductive.  Smart.

With that, I am writing off Creative’s speaker offerings.  Their sound cards and portable media players have already turned me off, I guess this is the last straw.  When you buy the most expensive set of speakers currently available, you expect them to last a decade or more.   Like the beige plastic Altec Lansings that I have been kicking around for years…

–Nat

Whew, finally done installing 7

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All of the PC’s in the Juchems Blaine household are now on Windows 7.  Most of the ones in Plainfield are as well, only one left there!  Windows 7 is great operating system that really takes away many of the reasons to be a rebel and stick with XP or be lazy and stay on Vista.  If not having the most secure and feature rich Windows operating system out there so far isn’t enough to get your rear in gear, here are a few more reasons to move.

First off, if you have Vista, upgrading to 7 is a complete cinch.  Get the same version of 7 that you have of Vista (ie, Ultimate to Ultimate) put in the disk and away it goes.  I have done this several times with no ill effects.  Be prepared to free up some space on your C: drive and reinstall your video drivers.  It might take a bit, but it is so easy its almost criminal.  You don’t have to pay someone to do it 🙂

With XP, you need to be prepared to wipe it out and start fresh.  Also, if your PC is older than Vista (late 2006) you should be prepared that things like wireless cards and printers may not work.   Look for drivers before you go for the upgrade.  Beyond that, make sure you have your media and keys for things like Office are at hand, back up your important data to a couple different places, put the DVD in and enjoy!  It will preserve anything in your “my documents” folder if you choose to not nuke your XP partition when installing but you shouldn’t rely on that.  In my experience, installing 7 plus running windows update once after the install will catch an incredible amount of diverse hardware.

Lastly, avoid buying a retail copy of 7.  NewEgg OEM is the way to go. Buy the 64 bit if you can, only buy the 32 bit version if you have to.  If you buy it now, you can expect to have a solid five year lifespan on that Operating System. Might as well jump in early!

–Nat

Cheap Toner & Ink

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I’ve always appreciated Monoprice for their cheap cables and they are widely known around the internet as the place to go for decent quality cables at low prices.  What I didn’t realize is that they have such a great selection of toner and ink for printers at approprately low prices as well.  Many of the toners I looked at received good reviews, so I won’t hesitate to order from them the next time I need ink.  Check it out!

https://www.monoprice.com/

–Nat

Microsoft DNS

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I am willing to bet that most implementations of Microsoft DNS are those that are integrated with Active Directory.  When setting up DNS with AD, setting up multiple DNS servers is fairly trivial because AD takes care of the zone transfers, etc.  I am resisting putting the Blaine-Juchems household into a domain because I really don’t want to have to fight the same fight at home as I do at work.  Frankly, the DNS is more work than it should be, but the fact we are hosting websites that I would like to actually visit inside of our network dictates the need for DNS.  A quick and dirty definition of DNS (Domain Name System) is what turns a site address/name (like www.google.com) into a piece of data that gets you where you want to go on the internet.  In my case specifically, www.teamjuchems.com was not a valid name inside of my network and so I couldn’t access my own blog inside of my own house.  Lame.   If you don’t care about DNS, I would suggest you come back when I have a friendlier post.

Installing and configuring DNS is pretty easy.  Depending on what version of Windows Server you are running, you either add DNS as a network service or as a new role.  From there, you setup a forward zone, which is were you catch local DNS traffic and turn names into IP addresses, and a reverse zone, which turns IP address into names.  I won’t go into extreme details here as it gets kind of messy, I am sure that Google will get you much better walkthroughs than what I feel like providing right now.

What will cause you some grief is that if you aren’t running a Active Directory Domain along side of your DNS implementation is that your hosts won’t have a fully qualified domain name, which will really come into play when you want to setup zone transfers and DHCP with a default DNS suffix.  I was at a loss at how to do this as the trick of configuring the network adapter to have a specific suffix wasn’t working for the DNS services even though ipconfig was showing the correct FQDN.  Well, there is a button for that!

These are the magic buttons!

These are the magic buttons!

Once I had setup the actual DNS suffix in a place so close to where I have been hundreds of times before (almost the same spot where you would add the computer to a domain) the error messages went away and the StartOfAuthority issues I had been seeing went away.

Now, I also made the wise choice of  burning two valuable hours of sleeping time trying to get another zone transfer completed successfully.  Turns out that the zone files had been corrupted in the DNS share of the primary DNS server, so I exported it out to a .txt file and manually recreated the two records.  Once again I added the second DNS server as a name server for the zone and on the second server configured the secondary forwarding zone and poof, it worked.  How does a DNS record get corrupted on a clean server?  How does Microsoft have error codes that they don’t have in their resolution database (DNS error 1501, I feel pretty special…)

It works now and I am ready to enable DHCP on my Windows Home Server and flip my primary router into access point mode, effectively flattening out my network and resolving some lingering port forwarding issues.

Kristin makes comments about how overly complicated our home setup is and usually I brush them off as I am learning a lot as I go along.   Sometimes, though, I definitely agree.  Like at 1am this morning.

–Nat