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Virtualizing Workstations For Common Hardware?
An anonymous reader writes "We have approximately 20 workstations which all have different hardware specs. Every workstation has two monitors and generally runs either Ubuntu or Windows. I had started using Clonezilla to copy the installs so we could deploy new workstations quickly and easily, when we have hardware failures or the like, but am struggling with Windows requiring new drivers to be installed for all new hardware. Obviously we could be booting into Ubuntu and then load a Windows virtual machine after that, but I'd prefer not to have the added load of a full GUI underneath Windows — we want maximum performance possible. And I don't think the multi-monitor support would work. Is it possible to have a very basic virtual machine beneath to provide hardware consistency whilst still allowing multi-monitor support? Does anyone have any experience with a technique like this?"
VMWare View is what you want.
It's easy enough to slipstream (lots of) extra drivers and periodically update a master install .iso using tools such as nlite.
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I am in a virtualized environment and it works fine. I guess it really depends on your situation.
Most of my users are using basic business apps. For these things, Citrix XenApps (I think that is the name this week) works well.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
NxTop is pretty cool. It is a hypervisor that installs directly onto the client hardware, allowing you to pull and boot pre-configured images over the network. The hypervisor removes the need for specialized drivers and supports dual monitors. It also has the advantage over VMwareView of allowing the OS to sync for offline use if you would like to leave the office with a laptop. Sure VMware has it as an "experimental" feature now, but it is production with these guys. They came and did a demo for us the other day, pretty cool stuff. I think it was affordable too. You can set policies for who gets what images, remotely disable a lost or stolen laptop, etc. Check this out: http://www.virtualcomputer.com/About/press/nxtop-pc-management-launch-massively-scalable-desktop-virtualization-for-mobile-pcs
this was solved a long time ago. Sysprep allows you to bundle whatever drivers you want, and it will just load what it needs on first boot. Combine that with a network imaging solution (back when I worked in that area, we used ZENworks, but there are other options), and ideally network installs of software (i.e. the image should be a base OS and not much else) and you should have limited problems. A new machine type will require a new image, but you can just deploy the old one, add the new drivers, run sysprep and re-create the image. I never had to do mass-imaging of Linux machines, but surely you could take a similar approach for the Ubuntu images?
What is...?
Wow, it is only 'an' when the 'h' is actually silent, such as 'an hour'. When the 'h' makes an actual sound, such as hypervisor, the word 'a' is used instead.
Only if you're an american. the rest of the English speaking world manages to pronounce H's fine.
Let's try it together. H-E-R-B-S.
What is...?
http://driverpacks.net/
It's not cheap so might not be a viable option for a smaller shop, but VMware has been making some very interesting strides in this area.
Check out VMware View, also known as PCoIP (Yes, that is personal computer over internet protocol)
http://www.vmware.com/products/view/
http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10083
Put really simply, each real workstation is loaded with a minimal system and the vmware view clients.
When a user goes to login to a computer on your network, after authentication their virtual workstation pops up (Be it windows or ubuntu) and lets them work.
All of the actual 'workstations' being used are virtual machines, thus are the same unified image you are looking for with one set of drivers.
While I have not tested it with a multi-monitor setup, they claim it is supported.
The one main thing you do lose is full accelerated 3D support, and direct support for old eccentric hardware. (Think ISA card support and non-standard PCI interfaces)
I can say USB support is simply amazing in how well it works.
Clients can even play full interactive flash media and video, and it runs well (As well as one would expect it to work in native OS anyway)
A bit off-topic, but related to virtualization, so here's my question:
What's the best way for me to make a "snapshot" of an existing, functional Windows XP system, such that I can boot up (a copy of) this system at a later point in time?
Background: I have a computer running Windows XP, with a bevy of development tools (including databases, IDE's, build system, etc.) installed, involving loads of configurations, etc. I have not current use for this environment, but for legacy purposes would like the option of firing it up in the future, should I need to do a demo or explain it to someone else.
I have no real experience with virtualization, but it sounds relevant / useful here. What I'm picturing is an "image" / snapshot of the system, which I can later run within a virtual machine in some other operating system. How can I do that? Or do you recommend a different approach?
Thanks!
I recommend not going with Microsoft. Since you went with Microsoft, good luck with XP in the future. Too bad you didn't pick an open system with no proprietary technologies and file formats. If you had, you'd easily be able to move your data to any more modern system. But you went with the monopolist and now you got the shaft. At this point the only thing you're good for is an example to others of what not to do. Have a nice day!
VMWare has a tool to create an image from a "real" PC.http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/
What is...?
What you are looking for is called type 1 or bare-metal client hypervisor. Bare-metal client hypervisor's are a fairly new technology with the leading ones "which are still in development" being from Citrix and VMware. They are XenClient and CVP both are expected to be out later this year. Two of the smaller players in this field are Neocleus and Virtual Computer both have a general release product however neither of them have been around long enough to be proven.Hope this helps you might not have a the solution you are looking for today but by next year you should have some good options.
I would argue just about every point here.
modern hypervisors are quite fast. Most of the perceived slowdown is a result of using something like VNC to access the VM.
basic linux install with KVM and the console glued to the VM. Get serious and contribute some software developers or put out some bounties to make a windows video driver appropriate for your needs.
Wow, such terrible advice from slashdot. The easiest way to move Windows OS from one machine to another when their are hardware differences is to get your self a copy of shadowprotect and use the HIR (hardware independent restore) option. Google it. Virtualising is not the best way to by a long shot to do what you are trying to do.
Xen would be the way to do it, if you had servers. Running the display on the same system as the Xen system is, last I checked, not yet possible.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Well you probably should do a couple of things, possibly more, just to be safe / conenient for varying possible future use scenarios.
1) Make an image copy of the entire drive, and any others that are referenced by your configurations. Boot sector, partition table, C partition, other partitions / drives, the whole set. There is really no general substitute for having a copy of every single factor that could affect your ability to recreate the system exactly as it is if you need to do that on a physical machine or with some future set of virtualization tools. Since it is next to impossible to rebase / reconfigure applications that have configurations referring to paths under D:, E:, F:, DVD/CD drive as O:, whatever, you'll want to note all the mappings that could be relevant to making the applications work again and copy that data too.
2) Look at the free "disk2vhd" tool from Microsoft's sysinternals site. Maybe it can help convert your physical C partition into a VHD image which you could potentially eventually boot with something like "Windows XP mode" or Microsoft Virtual PC or Hyper V. Read up on some physical to virtual scenarios using Virtual PC and Hyper V and XP Mode and see what is most likely to work for you. There are various good technet / microsoft / msdn / 3rd party FAQs and blog posts about the good and bad points of doing physical to virtual mappings like that with their various tools.
3) It is possible you could make some use of the Windows AIK or MDOP tools to help your physical to virtual conversions. One thing that is commonly done before capturing an image from a physical machine before virtualizing it is "sysprep /generalize" which takes out some of the machine specific device drivers, licensing activation data, etc. so that the resultant image is more generically transportable to a different machine or VM. YMMV. The blogs / recipes online above will guide you as to the best options.
4) Check out Virtualbox the free VM system from Sun/Oracle. Read their forums about some physical to virtual capturing scenarios. I'm often more impressed with the functionality of virtualbox than microsoft's virtual pc / XP mode, so maybe it would be a better choice for you. Though the tools to do p2v conversions are kind of weak in both camps, nothing truly a click once automatic process.
5) There are probably some good ways to do physical to virtual conversions with a LINUX OS too; the qemu/kvm hypervisor is pretty effective at virtualizing XP in recent versions of LINUX like Fedora 13 beta or Ubuntu 10.04 beta 2 both of which are newly available, though the qemu/kvm virtualization has been working well for years. OpenSuse11.2 should work too. Anyway there are various tools you can use to capture the images of the XP C partitions and other partitions into QCOW or other such formats that can be used with the VM software to run the virtualized system. Again device drivers loaded into the physical XP system will often possibly be problematic so either remove them manually or sysprep /generalize the physical OS or just try booting the VM into safe mode and then getting rid of the old drivers. Whatever works.
6) Of course the easiest solution probably hasn't been invented yet, and next year's VM systems might not even be compatible with some of the disk formats and configurations todays VM systems use, so, again, that's why it's good to keep a full image or physical copy of the original drives handy in case you want to convert them again later.
You're doing this in a laboratory situation, not in the realworld. Your approach will not work when you're talking about running a hundred, or a thousand, concurrent VMs on commodity hardware.
Woah. Hold on. Who said anything about running hundreds, even thousands of concurrent VMs? I think the parent (and actually the subject) is talking about single local box, single VM.
I've been doing the same thing for a few years now. I can't escape Windows apps so I run a VM to provide a Windows desktop. That's worked pretty well for me except for lately where performance has degraded - I suspect due to my using a real partition (which is no longer supported). Co-worker of mine does the same thing and has no issues whatsoever (which he points out when I grumble at my VM).
The latest versions of Ghost are the same as Backup Exec System Recovery, except that BESR allows you to back up/clone servers.
BESR is really good software. I use it quite a bit; I back up all my home servers with it. I've used it to perform P2V's of servers when the normal Platespin/VMware Convertor doesn't work for whatever reason.
BESR/Ghost allows you to take a full snapshot of a disk or a full machine. It's very fast. Restoring is very easy; insert the bootable Vista-based CD, and restore from a local disk or network. You can load drivers from USB sticks or CD's, or make custom bootable discs with your own drivers.
You can take snapshots, and create incremental snapshots on top of those. The incrementals are super fast. You can mount any snapshot as a drive letter, if you want to.
It has a "restore-anywhere" feature, which will put Windows into a sort-of "OEM" mode, so when it boots up for the first time it will run the hardware detection routine. I've been able to move Windows to different hardware real easy this way. You can also use it to move from a Virtual machine to a physical one.
I can't really say enough good things about BESR. It just works, it's fast, reliable, and restorations are super easy.
You can download a trial that works for 90 days from Symantec's site.
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And the really great part is that sun virtualbox can read the vmware virtual machine created by that tool.
and vmconverter can eat a lot of diskimages format also (BUT NOT ALWAY THE VERY LATEST, check before spending time on it!!)
Before you start with any tool it is nice to clean of any unwanted software and restore points, clean the trashcan (Crapcleaner tool), and try to fill all unused space on the disk with zero's.
BTW, I learned the hard way that truecrypt is incompatibele with any on the fly diskimagers.
Yeah, I tried that before, doesn't work all that well with Windows. With Linux and practically any other OS you can just deploy a generic image with a modular kernel on the system and it will generally work. Network adapters work with a generic driver, video cards work with a generic driver, usb ports work with a generic driver.
With Windows, only the APIC or the boot drive hardware (PATA/SATA/SCSI) have to be different from the original host for the thing to give a blue screen even when sysprepped. Even when the drivers are included and you have an image of a system with the same APIC, the system has been sysprepped but the USB ports aren't the same as whatever machine you made the image off, the system won't be able to react to your input unless all USB hardware has been re-detected (which can take a while and sometimes requires a cold reboot as you can't click on the dialogs). Whenever an update (especially Service Packs) needs to be included in your image, all drivers have to be re-checked (manually) for all your different hardware to make sure none needs to be updated as well. Ideally you would have test-systems, replicas of each piece of hardware you have but even in small organizations this can add up to 10's or 100's of idle hardware that you have to acquire and justify.
I now know why large organizations standardize on a single vendor and can't offer their end-users any choices in hardware besides the amount of RAM and hard drive space. Windows is just plain bad to maintain even with experienced admins. I have virtualized practically all installations of it and even though it takes a slight performance hit, it's much easier to manage than trying to keep up with images for all the different hardware you can have in a single organization.
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Trying to make a diskimage when truecrypt is active i get a vss error like
Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Unexpected error ... 0x80070057
invalid parameter
dismouting the truecrypt device and everything went ok.
somthing like:
http://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/shadow-copy-components-not-working-various-vss-writer-failures-no-vss-writer-errors
searching now i see it is documented:
http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=issues-and-limitations
"The Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service is currently supported only for partitions within the key scope of system encryption (for example, a system partition encrypted by TrueCrypt or a non-system partition located on a system drive encrypted by TrueCrypt). Note: For other types of volumes, the Volume Shadow Copy Service is not supported because the documentation for the necessary API is available from Microsoft only under a non-disclosure agreement (which is impossible to comply with because TrueCrypt is open source).
"
Maybe it is solved now.