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By Rob, August 17, 2010 8:56 AM

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!

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By Rob, April 30, 2010 7:39 PM

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.

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By Rob, August 5, 2009 1:36 PM

It might seem a little odd to some, attempting to install Microsoft Windows XP into a Virtual Machine running on VMware’s ESX 3.5. That’s more of a job for VMware Workstation or Player. However, I wanted to install a Windows XP VM in my ESX test environment, to try some things out. I was a little surprised when I was greeted with this message during the initial install though:

I’ve installed countless Windows Server 2003 VMs, and not had any issues. Pre-morning-coffee, it wasn’t immediately obvious why Windows XP would have any issues installing, especially as its listed as a supported VM type during the virtual hardware configuration steps. Continue reading 'Installing Windows XP on VMware ESX/ESXi — No Hard Disk Drive Found'»