cmaduro's questions

I need to restore a vhdx file from backup on a Windows 2019 Hyper-V Core server using the command line. This is the command I am using:

wbadmin start recovery -version:10/12/2021-05:00 -itemType:hyperV -items:F3D...1E -recoveryTarget:C:\temp

The command generates the following warnings. After which I am prompted to continue with the restore or cancel it.

Warning: If a Virtual Machine you are trying to recover to alternate location was backed up from this host, this will delete and overwrite the original virtual machine if it still exists.

You have chosen to recover the application HyperV. The files for the following components will be recovered to C:\temp. Note: Recovering the files to an alternate location without involving writer will not recover the application.

Warning: The virtual machines might not start if their network settings are different after recovery. After recovery is complete use Hyper-V Manager to verify the network settings of the virtual machines before they are started.

I do not want the restore operation to delete and overwrite the original VM as it states in the warning. Further the warning seems to be contradictory. The scenario I would like to have play out is written in the Note as I am assuming that "...without involving the writer the application will not recover the application" possibly means that wbadmin will despite its warning, not overwrite the VM on the host. I cannot find any information on this online.

Furthermore there is an [-alternateLocation] option to the wbadmin start recovery command that is poorly documented. It does not even seem to be included in the official Microsoft documentation online.

-alternateLocation  Valid only when recovering HyperV to alternate recovery target.
                    Allows recovering the HyperV components, updating configuration and
                    registering the VM with the Hyper-V management service.

Using it slightly changes the warnings I get, namely the Note is ommitted.

Warning: If a Virtual Machine you are trying to recover to alternate location was backed up from this host, this will delete and overwrite the original virtual machine if it still exists.

You have chosen to recover the application HyperV. The files for the following components will be recovered to C:\temp.

Warning: If a Virtual Machine you are trying to recover to alternate location was backed up from this host, this will delete and overwrite the original virtual machine if it still exists.

Warning: The virtual machines might not start if their network settings are different after recovery. After recovery is complete use Hyper-V Manager to verify the network settings of the virtual machines before they are started.

What I want to achive is basicaly a "Copy To File" as is found in the GUI version (Windows Server Backup) and I suspect the way to achieve this is by omitting the [-alternateLocation] option. I would like to see if anyone can confirm this before I pull the trigger and shoot myself in the foot. BTW I'm talking about an in production domain controller VM. So I cannot take any chances.

I have a fileserver on a WORKGROUP.

I have turned on public folder sharing, file and printing sharing and set password protected sharing to off.

When I try to share a subfolder of the public folder by right clicking it and selecting proerties, then selecting sharing tab, then clicking the "share" button, then clicking share, it prompts me asking wether or not I want to turn on network discovery for public network, and after I say either yes or no, it says that my folder cant be shared.

When I try to share via advanced sharing, then the folder is shared, and it's status is set to shared.

However when I try to access this folder from a computer on the same network, it prompts me to enter a username and password.

I am trying to setup a share for my VMware ThinApp packages that can be access no matter what domain the users are on.

I have a few datastores on my ESXi server, as seen below. I am moving files from one datastore to another. It is just taking too long. I have done io testing on the hard disks, and I know they can perform much better than this.

What really is going on?

Why is it so slow?

What can I do to speed this up?

I am trying to tune my NFS performance, but for some reason nexenta is ignoring whatever I specify in /etc/system. In the following screen shot it becomes apparent that my manual settings are not being picked up, why? I realize the web gui does give me the option of specifying the tcp_recv_hiwat and tcp_xmit_hiwat, but what about the other variables?

In VMWare vSphere 5 I have the following setup. Why is there no communication on vSwitch1?

vSphere Configuration:

NAS Configuration:

Ping Tests:

I am getting poor write performance on a NFS share hosted with OpenIndiana 151a. I have 2x 1 TB Mirror (Seagate constellation drives), 2 SSD drives, 1 read cache and 1 write cache. My thinking was, that by using a write cache I would gain SSD like performance even though I have a pretty slow hard disk. I am getting an avg of 40 MB/s. I should note that both my SSD drives are SATA3 capable of 500 MB/s. I feel cheated! My setup is as follows:

• ESXi 5, NFS datastore, MTU set to 9000 on VMkernel and vSwitch
• VM1 OpenIndiana hosting the datastore, resides on direct attached storage.
• VM2 Windows XP with 2 10GB hard drive, 1 system drive, 2nd testing drive, using HD tune pro, resides on NFS datastore.

I am busy running a spectrum of IOmeter tests, will post results when I am done.

I am not seeing the advertised SATA3 speeds here, would I just be better off using the SSD's as direct attached storage? In other words, is NFS the problem here?

XenServer 6.0.2 install fails no matter what I do. I have confirmed that the md5 checksum on my ISO file is good. I tried installing from a mounted ISO file (remotely via iKVM). I tried installing from physical media. I tried installing from a bootable USB stick (using syslinux + contents of the ISO)

All attempts have yielded the same result: When verifying the installation media, at 0% initializing, the following is reported: "Some packages appeared to be damaged." followed by a list of pretty much all the gz2 and rpm packages.

If I skip the media verification the installer proceeds and then gives me an error when it reaches "Installing from base pack" at 0% which states "An unrecoverable error has occurred. The error was: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 20710: ordinal not in range(128) Please refer to your user guide, or contact a Technical Support Representative, for further details" there is one option left which is to reboot.

Apparently at some point during the processing of the repositories on the installation media non-ascii characters are found, which causes the installer to quit. How do I fix this?

Here are my specs

• TYAN S8236 motherboard
• 2 AMD Opteron 6234 processors
• LSI2008 card connected to 2 1TB Seagate Constellation drives SATA, 1 500GB Corsair m4 SSD SATA and 1 Corsair Forse 3 - 64GB SSD SATA
• Onboard SATA connected to a slim DVD-+RW.
• Onboard SAS connected to 2 IBM ESX 70GB 10K SAS drives (for XenServer)
• 256GB memory

================================================================================= Comments: According to pylonsbook.com "chances are you have run into a problem with character sets, encodings, and Unicode" – cmaduro 10 hours ago

A clue is provided by "vmware.com/support/vsphere5/doc/…; Data migration fails if the path to the vCenter Server installation media contains non-ASCII characters When this problem occurs, an error message similar to: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xd0 in position 30: ordinal not in range(128) appears, and the installer quits unexpectedly during the data migration process. – cmaduro 10 hours ago

This is an error that python throws. And guess what, the .py extention of the file you have to edit in this link community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/1168 means the installer is written in python. Python is interpreted, so now to find the install file responsible for this error. – cmaduro 6 hours ago

The file that generates the error upon verification is /opt/xensource/installer/tui/repo.py. The error message appears around line 359. – cmaduro 2 hours ago

I am fairly sure that the install error is generated somewhere in repository.py as the backend.py file throws errors while methods in that file are being called. Perhaps all errors can be traced back to this file. – cmaduro 1 hour ago

Why can I not have a purely virtualized SAN in vSphere 5? I cannot enable the iSCSI port binding option (it is greyed out and unchecked) or add the VMkernel to the iSCSI software host bus adapter unless there is a physical NIC associated with the vSwitch.

My hostd.log file on vSphere 5 says that partedUtil is timing out while trying to write the partition table on an iSCSI target being served from OpenIndiana/napp-it.

I read that sized over 2TB give problems, so I sized the volume to 500GB.

I tried mounting the target in Ubuntu 11.04 with open-iscsi and it worked, so this seems to be an issue with the vSphere implementation of iSCSI or not?

I am trying to tune my vSphere 5 and virtualized SAN for performance, but the network adapters for all networks seems to be stuck at 100Mb Full duplex instead of 1000Mb Full duplex. Does this mean that all communications between VM's on the all virtual networks is stuck at 100Mb full duplex, even though many VM's use the vmxnet3 drivers? How can I fix this?

I have two 2.5" SAS drives which have a SFF-8482 connector. I also have an LSI 9211-8i controller card, as well as a TYAN motherboard with a SAS controller. Both of these controllers use the SFF-8087 mini clip.

My motherboard comes with several 4 channel forward breakout cables with sata connectors on one end and SFF-8087 connector on the other end.

Could I hookup my two SAS drives with a male to male SATA adapter and one of these cables?

Given a production environment running VMware ESXi 5 and VMware View 5. Given that all components of this system run as VM's inside ESXi 5. After reviewing the VMware view best practices guide the following recommendation is given.

• Step 1 Back up vSphere
• Step 2 Back up View Connection Server AD-LDS datastore
• Step 3 Back up View Composer database
• Step 4 Back up vCenter database

Is this not rather redundant since all components are themselves running on VM's inside ESXi, and will effectively have been backed up after step 1? If using NexentaStor CE, how do features like ZFS snapshots, auto-tier and auto-sync fit into the backup plan?

Possible Duplicate:
What are the merits of SAS vs SATA drives?

Would it be OK to use a SATA 6Gb/s desktop drive in a server? Say for example a 4 Seagate ST31000524AS drives in a raid 10 array.

I will be using NexentaCE. I will be using a 240Gb SSD as a L2ARC cache (read) to the RAID array. I will be using a smalled SSD as a ZIL for the write cache.

I cannot find any 1TB Constellation drives for reasonable prices anymore.

Is there a windows sidebar gadget that can display the CPU/RAM/HDD and network status given the ip address and possible a username/password for a given remote Windows 2008 server?

I keep getting an error message when trying to setup ESXi 5 on VMware workstation. The ESXi installer boots up and there is a progress bar at the top. When this bar 'fills up' the installer wants to start the kernel but it freezes and VMware workstation displays the error message: "The CPU has been disabled by the guest operating system. You will need to power off or reset the virtual machine at this point."

What is the maximum number of physical cpu's (and more importantly, cores per cpu) that ESX 5 supports?

Use Case: 1 Server with 2 Intel 8 core cpu's. Will all 16 cores be utilized?

Here is our goal:

Setup new servers to turn our entire physical computer network into 3 physical groups, which are:

• Server 1 - NAS - Openfiler/NexentaStor CE/FreeNAS/(Other Suggestions)

• Server 2 - ESXi Server with the following VM's:
  • VM1 - AD/DNS/DHCP - Windows SBS 2008
  • VM2 - SQL Server 2008 r2 / Database Tier - Windows Server 2008 R2
  • VM3 - Sharepoint 2010 / Applicaton Server Tier - Windows Server 2008 R2
  • VM4 - IIS / Web Front End Tier - Windows Server 2008 R2
  • VM5 - Windows Multipoint Server 2011 - Supporting 10 Clients / Some with 2D Cad

• 10 Clients - Atrust M220 WMS Zero Clients

Question:

For servers 1 & 2, I would like to know what configuration ensures maximum performance?

Configuration means:

• Hot Swap Hard Disk Options
  • iSCSI targets
  • Regular volumes
  • 7500 SAS disks
  • 10/15K SAS disks
  • VM's on iSCSI target on NAS machine
  • VM's on DAS
  • RAID 0/1/5/10
  • No RAID and ZFS file system
• Memory Configurations
  • 2/4/8/16/32 Gb DDR3 Memory
• CPU Configuration
  • Xeon / Opteron
  • 2/4/8 Cores
  • 1/2 Physical CPU's
• OS
  • For NAS server, Openfiler OR NexentaStor CE OR FreeNAS OR some other free option