I’ve finished the server migration and everything was successful and only maybe 30-45 minutes of downtime. The old computer I’m using for a server got an upgrade while I was migrating as well. A little faster processor and doubled the memory in it.

I did run into a problem with ESXi, apparently since the motherboard was older in the server ESXi wouldn’t install correctly onto the drive I had in there, and the motherboard also didn’t support booting from USB to install ESXi to a flash drive, as suggested by a few sites. So I scraped the idea for ESXi and installed CentOS 5.4 on the server without any desktop managers and disabled everything except a few essential services, this netted a server using less than 200 MB of memory. Then I installed VMWare Server 2 on it and transferred my VM image over to the server. Although there is more overhead having a complete OS and VM Server for my purposes it should be fine.

Before this week, my server that handles this website was beginning to show signs that it need a fresh start. It’s currently running CentOS 4.4, so I decided it’s time to upgrade. So I grabbed the latest DVD iso from CentOS for 5.4 and installed a clean virtual machine on my desktop. I’ve just finished migrating everything from the old server to the virtual machine. I’ve also done away with the cobbled together mail solution of sendmail, dovecot, and assp I had running in favor of a very nice open-source Exchange-type replacement called Zimbra.

The next step after a couple of days of testing will be wiping the old drive in the old server and installing VMWare ESXi on it. I decided to virtualize to make it easier to upgrade in the future when I decide to build a new desktop. I’ll retire my current desktop and recommission it as the new server and having everything virtualized should make the transition much smoother. I’m hoping downtime will be minimal if any at all.

Recently Microsoft had announced a big feature of Windows 7, “XP Mode” as most call it. This allows people to install all their favorite XP software that won’t run in Vista or 7 in a XP virtual pc. Or at least as it was supposed to work, but many people with Intel processors won’t be able to use this feature. Microsoft is requiring that the computer on which 7 is installed to have hardware virtualization support. Since VirtualPC that the XP mode uses is a software hypervisor the decision makes no sense.

AMD processors have AMD-V (hardware virtualization) on all but their Sempron line. Intel on the other hand used the feature as a way to divide their processor models and don’t have as many models with the support. Tom’s Hardware has a list of all the Intel models that support VT-x.

Source: ArsTechnica

Does this look strange to you, it should but thanks to Sun’s VirualBox you can accomplish this. What is this you ask? Well it’s running a virtual machine in seamless mode, one of VirtualBox’s features. What does this matter though. Well instead of having to constantly switch back and forth between a virtual machine and your host machine when doing testing you have easy access to both. I’ve uploaded a few screenshots to show what I mean.

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Vmware has announced the beta of their virtualization product. I haven’t tried out the newest version yet but I use Vmware Server on an almost daily basis for testing with different operating systems. I have several distros of linux installed as well as different server environments.

Features:

• Web-based management interface: A new Web-based user interface provides a simple, flexible, intuitive and productive way for you to manage your virtual machines.
• Expanded operating system support: VMware Server now supports Windows Vista Business Edition and Ultimate Edition (guest only), Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn Server Beta 3), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Ubuntu 7.1, among others.
• Greater scalability: Take full advantage of high-end hardware with support for up to 8GB of RAM per virtual machine, up to two virtual SMP (vSMP) processors and up to 64 virtual machines per host.
• 64-bit guest operating system support: Run high-performance operating systems in virtual machines with support for Intel EM64T VT-enabled processors and AMD64 processors with segmentation support.
• Support for VIX API 1.2: This feature provides a programming interface for automating virtual machine and guest operations.
• Support for Virtual Machine Interface (VMI): This feature enables transparent paravirtualization, in which a single binary version of the operating system can run either on native hardware or in paravirtualized mode.
• Support for USB 2.0 devices: Transfer data at faster data rates from USB 2.0 devices.