Suse Linux Enterprise Sneak Preview

For those who want to experiment with Suse Linux Enterprise 11 RC4, you can download a so called sneak preview at novell.
Like I haven’t work enough…..

New ESX Enviroment

Maybey you noticed that my blog was sometimes down the last couple of day’s.

This is because Cristmas came early this year for me. The last 5 years I was running
1 ESX 3.5 host. This was a AMD64 2 Ghz with 2 GB of memory. This server was running
3 Virtual Machines. 2 OES2 servers (one of them hosts my blog)
and 1 Windows XP VM (yes, sometimes you need it).

The last year this wasn’t enough, so I bought two new server for myself. Hmm server,
just heavy workstations (HP Pavillion M9550 with 1 Intel Core Quad Q9300 and
4 GB of memory each!). I had to buy extra NIC’s because the onboard NIC isn’t supported.
The NIC wasn’t the only thing that wasn’t supported, even the onboard RAID controoler
isn’t supported. I hear you thinking: “If the NIC and RAID controller isn’t supported for ESX,
why did you buy this hardware.” Let’s say I got a good price out of it.
But how did I got ESX installed? This I find a really nice solution. Like many workstations,
this workstation had a intergrated card read. So I bought 2 Compact Flash cards and
installed ESX 3.5I U3 on them. I removed the 1 TB disk and put them in my old server
where I installed Freenas. I created one RAID1 and published it as a ISCSI volume
to my 2 new ESX 3.5I servers. Create a VMFS volume and copied the machines to
this Datastore.

1 Virtual Machine had a VMDK of 120 GB and one of 250 GB. So you can imaging
the copied took a while. The Windows XP machines is located on my OpenSuse
workstation on a NFS share.

The server who host my blog has to go down one more time, so I can copied to
the right location. So I will be offline one more time. I try to do it at night, but
looking at my stats many people around the world read my blog. So somebody
will notice it. Sorry!

How to Install a Standard Vmware View Connection Server

System Requirements

A Standard Vmware View Connection server can be installed on the  following supported configuration:

  • Pentium IV 2.0 Ghz CPU or higher (dual CPU recommended)
  • 2 GB RAM or more (3 GB recommended)
  • One or more 10/100 Mbps NIC (1000 Mbps recommended)

Supported Operating Systems:

  • Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition with SP2
  • Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition with SP2
  • Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition with SP2
  • Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition with SP2

Note: View Connections server isn’t supported on Windows Terminal Server

The Vmware View server has to be part of a Active Directory. Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 are supported.

Installation

This is quit simple. Just follow these instructions taken from the administration manual.

Before you start you will have to have ESX  and Virtual Center running.

  1. Run the following executable on the system that will host the View Connection
    Server, where xxx is the build number of the file:
    VMware-viewconnectionserver-xxx.exe
    The VMware Installation wizard is displayed. Click Next.

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  2. Accept the VMware license terms and click Next.

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  3. Accept or change the destination folder and click Next.

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  4. Choose the Standard deployment option.

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  5. Accept the ADAM (Microsoft Active Directory Application Mode) License Agreement

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  6. Click Next > Install > Finish.

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Of course this is only the beginning. After this you have to configure the View server. This will be posted in this blog part.  (Not yet Availible)

Upgrade to OES2 SP1 tutorial

There is a great tutorial on Novell Coolsolution how to upgrade to OES2 SP1. Here is the index.

  1. Preparing your current environment.
  2. Installation of OES2 SP1 Linux to a new server
  3. Securing the new OES2 SP1 Linux server.
  4. Data migration.
  5. DHCP migration.
  6. Printer migration.
  7. DNS migration.
  8. ZENWorks Desktop Management v7 SP1 – Optional.
  9. RSYNC modification – Optional.
  10. NetWare Server Decommission.
  11. Workstations.
  12. iFolder 2.x to 3.7 migration – Optional.

So: Read, Understand and Implement!

Simple network performance test

When I was searching on the internet for a simple way to test network speed if found this site. Here I found a command how I can test the netwerk speed using ftp combined with dd for Linux. The command is:

ftp> put "|dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1000" /dev/null

The guy used a count of 100, I perfer a count of 1000 so 1 GB is send over to the ftp server. This give a reliable result