TO-Tech Blog

Microsoft still doesn’t quite have quite caught the command line religion bug yet. It still takes a lot of code to perform simple tasks outside of the Virtual Server management web page. In the case of PowerShell, you even have to compile to C# code to create a custom DLL to use (um, ouch!). Fortunately, this freeware utility written by Jin Mao can fill part of this void for a lot of us too lazy to write a lot of code to do simple things (like pause and unpause a virtual machine).

VSPlus for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005

Although I have a slightly newer (Athlon 64-bit) PC running Windows Vista, my main PC is a 3 year old Athlon 32-bit based PC running Windows XP Media Edition. Last week this main PC started acting funny. It started taking longer and longer to boot up. Finally on Thursday evening, it failed to boot.

My first though was that this might be a good excuse to buy a Core 2 Duo PC :-). But, I surprised myself by thinking I did not want my main PC to run Windows Vista. I preferred XP for this PC because it syncs with my Windows Mobile smartphone (not sure I trust WMDC on Vista) and it is where my family photos reside (UAC makes even copying files to an external USB hard drive for backups an exercise in frustration). So, although I actually like Windows Vista enough to run it on my main PC at work (a Core 2 Duo notebook), I’m not willing to run it on my main home PC. This surprised me quite a bit. Has anyone else been faced with this issue? What did you decide? Stay with XP or move on to Vista?

BTW: Listening carefully, I noted three long beeps. Though I couldn’t find any boot sound diagnostic info for this particular PC (an eMachines PC), I guessed that it might indicate a RAM problem. So, I pulled the DIMM from the second socket and, yep, the PC booted with just 512MB in DIMM socket 0. I pulled a 512MB DIMM from my Linux box (rarely used these days since I usually run Linux as virtual machine using either Microsoft Virtual PC or VMware Workstation) and put it in my main PC. I also decided to upgrade my Vista box from 1GB to 2GB and have a pair of DIMMs on order from Crucial. I’m sure Virtual PC and VMware Workstation will be happier with more RAM.

BTW: The photo above is my collection of dead RAM from the last couple of years.

Microsoft released…

Virtual Machine Additions 2.0

…for Microsoft Virtual Server. You can also use it with Virtual PC, btw. I ran into glitches when attempting to use it with CentOS 4 (the community distro version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 which is in the supported list). The kernel additions did not fire according to the message seen during the rebooting process. And, the X11 addition did not install due to a conflict with existing Xorg files. A comment on…

The Virtual PC Guy’s

…blog mentions that tweaking files in /etc/init.d might fix some issues. So, I’m planning to take a look at the startup files in that directory later.

This is probably old news to most people. But, I only noticed this evening that the Vista Windows Photo Gallery displays videos as well as still images. Yeah, doh. I usually work on my family photos on a old Windows XP PC because XP on the old PC seems to run faster than Vista on a newer PC. In fact, even simple things like list files in Windows Explorer seems much faster on XP than Vista.

I have an old Celeron based XP PC with 1GB RAM in my office as well as a relatively new(ish) Core 2 Duo notebook running Vista with 2GB RAM. Vista seems to take forever just bringing up a list of files while XP (on a Celeron) is pretty fast. At home it is an ancient Athlon 32-bit box running XP and a slightly less ancient Athlon 64-bit box running Vista (32-bit).
In any case, if you are running Windows Vista and have a mix of still photos and videos in a folder (I keep all files from my digital camera, still and video by month to ease backups to DVD+R discs), double click on a still image near a video file (AVI in my case) to bring up Windows Photo Gallery. Then, press the forward button to move from file to file. The video should start playing right in Photo Gallery after a few seconds delay.

I’ve long wondered about why Microsoft included a virtual hard drive (VHD) compacting option in its Virtual Server Disk Inspector since it never seems to compact anything when I tried it. So I read the highlighted section on pages 24 and 25 of the book…
Professional Microsoft Virtual Server 2005

…titled Compacting a Dynamically Expanding Virtual Hard Disk with great interest. Ben Armstrong (a Microsoft Virtual Machine Product Manager) has provided a lot of good information about Virtual PC and Virtual Server in his Virtual PC Guy blog. So, his writing is heavily weighted in the valid column when I read what he has to say. However, in this case, I’m still mystified by VHD compacting even after reading this section and especially the Linux related aspects of this section.

Ben recommends zeroing out the Linux VHD free space by creating a file using cat /dev/zero > zero.dat. This creates a file that fills out the unused portion of the VHD. This fills up the hard drive. The next part of the scripts syncs the buffer and then removes the zero.dat file. This means if you have your dynamic VHD set to, say 127GB, you need at least 127GB and maybe 127GB x 2 (double). My test VHD was set to max out at 16GB. So, I didn’t have this problem. I had a lot of free server host hard disk space. I then shutdown the Linux Guest OS before heading over to the web-based Virtual Server management window to start the disk compacting. Here’s the odd result I found.

Size Linux reports used inside the Guest OS: 4.6 GB

Size Virtual Server reports VHD occupies on the host: 9.7 GB

Size of VHD with zero.dat file completely filled: 12.3 GB

The Virtual Hard Disk was a bit over twice the size of the file space Linux reported using. This is normal since this particular virtual machine sees moderate use as a test box. Files get installed and deleted frequently. The size of the VHD completely filled also makes sense although I thought it would get closer to 16GB. Here’s the surprise though. After completing the VHD compacting, the VHD file was 10.8 GB. Yep, compacting the VHD actually INCREASED its file size by 1.1 GB compared to where it was before starting the process of creating the zero.dat file.

Patch Tuesday is always a hassle if you have a bunch of virtual machines running in Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 (R2 SP1). I have my VMs set to Save State when VS2005 detects that the host is power off. The majority of the time (say 60 to 80%), the VMs restart and restore from Saved State. However, a couple of times a year, this doesn’t happen. I vaguely recalled Microsoft’s Virtual PC Guy (Ben Armstrong, Virtual Machines Program Manager) mentioning this in his blog a while back. So, I search his blog and, yep, here’s his blog item…

Problems with Virtual Server when shutting down the host

…that leads to Knowledge Base item 888745…

Guest computer state is not saved when you shut down the host computer on Virtual Server 2005

…which recommends dealing with this by making a change in the Registry (a potentially scary process on a server… be very very careful) that changes the WaitToKillServiceTimeout to 90000. FYI: The default value is 20000 on my Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition servers.

Unfortunately, this did not fix the problem for me. All my virtual machines set to save state and then restore from saved state after a reboot restarted after rebooting the host to install Patch Tuesday patches. I then made the registry change described in KB888745 and rebooted the host server again. And, again, all my VMs rebooted instead of being restored from Saved State.

FYI: The expected outcome (restore from saved state) worked when I rebooted for the August Patch Tuesday patches (the September Patch Tuesday patches did not require a reboot).

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UPDATE: In a Homer Simpson Doh! moment it occurred to me that I need to reboot the test server one more time to see if the registry change actually helps. The WaitToKillServiceTimeout would have still been 20000 and not 90000 in the second reboot described above.