Well I am back from L.A. (obviously) and VMware has posted up the recorded audio of the technical sessions, mine included.

Have a listen:
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/vmworld/

- Jason Langone

I recently needed a script to create a 200MB pagefile on C:\ (for dump purposes) and a 6144MB pagefile on D:\ for my virtual machine template. Here's a touch of WMI to handle the job.

'************************* Systems ArchiTECH *************************
'****************** www.SystemsArchiTECH.com ************************
' Author: Jason M. Langone
' Description:
' This script shall create a 200MB pagefile on C:\ and a 6144MB pagefile on D:\ as per the virtual machine standard
'const HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE = &H80000002
'strComputer = "."

In my previous post I explained the art of extending VMDKs and RAW LUNs in the ESX world. Today I will cover shrinking a .vmdk. It is important to resize the volume with a partition tool before you forcefully resize the .vmdk. If you fail to heed this advice you will have a nonfunctional volume whose partitions need to be reformatted.

1) Make sure you have a valid backup of the partition(s) in question.
2) Download SystemRescueCD
3) Power off your VM and mount the CD.
4) Boot up and marvel as the VM boots into Linux.
5) Hit enter to Boot (default).

Pre-release announcement

Manage your rFactor Dedicated Server from anywhere in the world!

Ubertechnik is developing a web-based management tool for rFactor dedicated servers. Control all aspects of the dedicated server including:
Night time racing
Parce Ferme
Session Length
Recon Lap

A Visual Explanation of SQL Joins
writing by Jeff Atwood over at CodingHorror.com gives a fantastic visual representation of the various types of SQL Joins (relavent to other DBs as well).

Here's a great visual representation of a FULL OUTER JOIN:

The last PC that I built was a Shuttle mobo with an AMD 2500XP+ overclocked (a very popular combination for overclocking).

The PC has been rock solid but it's time for an upgrade. I think my current game box will be relegated to a VMWare Server of some sort. Since it has IDE storage I'm going to install the OS on the ide drive and then use the iSCSI appliance as I covered in this post to provide a VMFS-3 capable partition. I'll be sure to document that process when the time comes.

But I digress,

Current build list:

I recently stumbled across a useful tool worth sharing, Iperf. is, "a tool to measure maximum TCP bandwidth, allowing the tuning of various parameters and UDP characteristics."

The tool is free and extremely simple to setup and leads perfectly into another useful tool I found, the Transfer Calculator.

Plug in fields like file dimension, network frame, data protocol and it will calculate how long the transfer should take.

There are a few minor bugs with the current release of UNNOC where you may want to delete some orphaned rows in the database. For those not proficient with MySQL command line, installing PHPMyAdmin is a great alternative.

To install from a server with www connectivity:

• apt-get install phpmyadmin

This is a pretty simply task and applicable to any major partition type (NTFS, FAT32, et cetera) but can be a little daunting for first timers. I recently had the need to expand an EXT3 partition in my UNNOC appliance appliance as the MySQL database had filled up the / partition. By issuing the proper vmkfstools -X command the disk will be expanded in size, but the partition will not automatically "fill" the new space.

If you go through the trouble of configuring SNMP to work properly on a VMware ESX/VI3 host, it's imperative that you also make sure that the daemon starts on boot. Fortunately, the command below will take care of that for you.

chkconfig snmpd on

- Jason Langone

It's never too late, so here's my take on VMWorld 2007...

The virtualization conference of the year, VMWorld 2007 certainly did not disappoint. The highlights of newly presented functionality is as follows:

* Site Recovery Manager

Now that you have your free iSCSI solution implemented, it's time to configure your VMware VI3 host to use the freshly presented volume. I'll continue from where the previous article left off with LUN 1, a raw 50GB LUN being presented from the virtual appliance.

The first step is to enable the Software iSCSI Initiator:

From Virtual Center...

• Host --> Configuration Tab --> Storage Adapters --> vmhba40 a/k/a the iSCSI Software Adapter
• Properties --> Configure --> Check ENABLED.

In my quest to build out a flexible VMWare VI3 environment at my home lab I originally implemented fiber channel storage (via a pair of Brocades and an HP MSA1000 hacked for Active-Active). I have since sold the FC kit and turned to free iSCSI solutions, which should suffice for my level of IO requirements. Since there are a number of free solutions out there, I decided to test out a few.

This evening I was awarded the 2007 VMware Virtual Vanguard Award for Best Disaster Recovery Solution. The solution I designed used a consecutive scripting engine (DSH) for the Linux environment as the base work for my solution. Once this environment was configured, I put a pool of scripts together to recover from server failure, storage array failure and site failure.

There are a few things I've already been impressed with here at VMWorld 2007: