Shariq Sheikh | Port 389

As usual a good conversation spurred on ActiveDir on a much discussed scenario of virtualizing your DCs while be varied of the known pitfalls. While virtualized DCs are fully supported on either competing virtualization solution by Microsoft, one known subject I would like to highlight here is the proper time synchronization. You must make sure that your PDCe gets its time from an external time source and other DCs follow the PDCe. All DCs (including PDCe) must not sync their time with the virtualization host, whether its VMware ESX or that of Hyper-V. It was discussed how by default the VMware’s VM settting does not have the time synchronization enabled by default, and my brief look at the Hyper-V’s VM suggested that it is. In any case, you must make sure that setting is disabled, thus VM does sync its time with its host.

VMware time setting from the VMware tools within the VM:

Or under the VM settings from VIC :

Hyper-V setting from the VM settings :

A great resource to refer to, to learn how to configure an authoritative time source for your DCs – see this KB http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816042

So its no news that this past Monday VMware released VMware ESXi for FREE, previously sold for $495. As witnessed by many, this is a right move in the right direction in terms of competing with Microsoft, with its free offering of Hyper-V – their flavor or native virtualization product.

However, there are things to keep in mind. While ESXi and ESX (most renowned in the market) match in the core functionality, VMware does not make the VirtuaCenter Server piece free. You would still need a licensed VMware Infrastructure 3 Suite in order to use VirtualCenter to manage multiple hosts, provision VMs easily and most importantly to take advantage of powerful tools such as HA, DRS and consolidated backup for VMs.

Nonetheless, I am excited at this prospect as many SMBs will now really be able to get the true taste of VMware ESX for their virtualization needs. I myself have run my home lab environment previously on VMware Server 1.0 and now on Virtual Server 2005 R2 (both non-native virtualization, running on top of other OS) as the news broke of FREE ESXi, I immediately wanted to know if this will run on my Dell PowerEdge 1800, a dual core Xeon processor machine. As I searched I didn’t find a definitive answer and found the provided HCL list of ESXi of no help.

I decided to give it a try and moved my Virtual Server 2005 VMs over to another storage. Got the ISO for VMware ESXi and ran the installation. It installed painlessly (following the Install Guide that comes in an email when you register for your free copy and includes the license key) and I now had a much better hypervisor performance VMware ESXi machine ready to go. I plan on migrating my Virtual Server 2005 VMs using VM converter which is available in the install when you download the eval. copy of VirtualCenter Server 2.5, and it gives you all previously mentioned features for 60 days. After the trial is over you can continue to use your Virtual Infrastructure Client to manage VMware ESXi and the VMs. I am looking forward to revamping my lab VMs and using the VirtualCenter features. Note, I installed VIC and VirtualCenter Server 2.5 on an XP machine and it works great. In future, I plan on installing the VirtualCenter Server piece on a Vista machine.

Lastly, most companies who have paid thousands of dollars for ESX and VI3 Suite should perhaps look into creating their Dev and QA environment using ESXi while utilizing their already paid license for VirtualCenter to manage multiple ESXi hosts. There is potential cost savings there.

Grab your free copy of VMware ESXi from here.

P.S – After you have installed it, don’t forget to license it with the key received in email from the Configuration tab and License option in VIC.

In my last post, I talked about what FSMO roles are how to retrieve them thru GUI. In this post I am showing you a quick way to tell what DCs are holding which FSMO roles in your forest/domain. It can be done by running NETDOM QUERY FSMO command at one of your DCs.

Notice, that my Schema Master and Domain Naming Master reside in the forest root domain (virtualdomain.com) since they are forest level FSMOs and the PDC Emulator, RID Master and Infrastructure Master are all on one DC (virtualdc3) which is on a separate domain tree (Shq.tech)

Typically NETDOM command-line tool enables administrators to manage Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 domains and trust relationships from the command line is available thru the Resource Kit. It has a range of syntax you can do various things with such as,

- Manage computer accounts for domain member workstations and member servers, Establish one-way or two-way trust relationships between domains.

Use NETDOM /? to see the available options or go here to get the list.

Oriel from VMware who is an Enterprise Platform Partner has recently launched a pure marketing site that has some rather interesting facts and good (visuals) calculator that lets you find potential savings for your organization when you hop on the VMware-way !

See for yourself