Comments (0) Finally, it’s officially supported.
I didn’t notice any fanfare about this and it doesn’t seem to be in the release notes for vSphere 4.1 or the What’s New document, but I noticed it in the compatibility matrix:
As of vSphere 4.1, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 is now an officially supported Operating System for vCenter Server. It’s about time!
I was trying to VMotion some VMs recently from one ESX host to another. Sounds simple enough. Except these VMs have RDMs in physical compatibilty mode. As such, they cannot be VMotioned whilst powered on. I powered down one of the VMs and retried the VMotion. Again, it failed, but with an error as follows:
Unable to migrate: Virtual Disk is a mapped direct access LUN that is not accessible
This suggested that the target host couldn’t see the LUN relating to the RDM. I double-checked, but already knew that all of my hosts had the same LUNs presented. So what was the problem?
It turns out that in order to VMotion a VM with an RDM, both the original and target host must have the LUNs presented using the same LUN ID. Somewhere along the way, one of the hosts had the LUNs presented in a different order, causing different LUN IDs to be assigned for that host.
To resolve this, you need to unpresent each incorrectly identified LUN and then re-present with the correct IDs. Not a trivial task if your cluster is made up of few hosts.
Virtualization
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ESX, RDM, VMWare
Yes, a recipe! I like to cook, and I’ve started experimenting in the kitchen, as I dont often have what a recipe asks for, so I try to use up what I do have instead. After reading and trying many overly-elaborate recipes for a simple tomato soup, I decided to try coming up with my own. So here it is:
Ingredients
2 Tins Chopped Tomatoes
100g Frozen Carrots (A handful) 
1 tbsp Olive Oil 1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp Dried Basil
2 Garlic Cloves (thinly sliced)
1 tbsp Tomato Puree
1 Large Onion (chopped)
Method
Heat the oil over a moderate heat in a large saucepan. Fry the onions and the garlic until softened. Add the tomato puree and tomatoes and stir until fully mixed. Add the Basil and salt, then turn up the heat a little. Add the carrots and simmer very gently for 10-15 minutes. Transfer the contents of the saucepan to a blender and blitz. Alternatively, you can use a stick blender directly in the saucepan, but make sure you get all the chunky bits. Return the soup to the pan and heat gently. Add water and keep stirring until you reach the desired consistency. The amount of water you require will depend on how watery your tomatoes were, and how thin you like your soup. Serve hot with some (preferably fresh) bread. Yum.
Note: Although I’ve included carrots, they dont really add anything to the flavour, they are included for texture. You could use fresh ones if you have any handy, but I always have vegetables in the freezer.
As I wrote in an earlier post, my iMac recently had a well overdue reinstall of everything. Whilst this is good news for the most part, it does cause problems with things like iTunes. I was particularly concerned about losing my iPhone backups. I needed to get my iTunes library back to how it used to be, including all my preferences, iPhone applications and backups. How do you do this though? The only bit of information Apple provide on their website is how to migrate your data from an old mac to a new mac, when you have both machines available. What if your old mac is your new mac? I didnt want to restore a Time Machine backup, as I wanted to ensure this was a fresh start, and not be bringing a load of stuff over that I wanted rid of. The migration assistant was of no use either.
Google wasn’t much help initially, but I did eventually come across this gem.
Whilst, like Apple, that article does discuss the process of copying from one physical machine to another, the process described works just as well when copying from a backup. In my case, I backed up the entire hard drive contents of my iMac using SuperDuper! before I wiped the iMac clean. So I had every file I’d ever need, including old system files.
A friend of mine recently bought a new MacBook Pro, and asked me how he could transfer his iTunes stuff to it from his G4 iMac. As he was not familiar with the Terminal, or Unix/Linux commands, I gave him an expanded version of the above article. If you’re in the same boat, here is the full process he followed to ‘restore’ iTunes:
Continue reading 'Migrating iTunes/iPod/iPhone from Old Mac (Backup) to New Mac'»
I came across this video as a link from a story on the BBC News site. It’s a cover of the current UK No. 1 single by Taio Cruz -- Break Your Heart. I much prefer this cover to the original. I think I might have to check out some more of this bands work. The singer has a great sounding voice.
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