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Tag Archives: VMware vSphere

VMware – The VMware virtualcenter server service terminated with service specific error code 2

A friend of mine who is still a student has been building his own VMware lab environment for some time now. Yesterday he contacted me that he couldn’t get the “VMware VirtualCenter Server service” to start anymore.

The log showed: EventID 7021 “The VMware VirtualCenter Server service terminated with service-specific error 2 (0×2).”

A quick google search however showed that many things could be causing this error. Because it was a lab environment, I wanted to upgrade the virtual center to the latest version. Before doing so, I took a look at the VMware blog post covering the latest update 5.1.0B. In the readme it said:

SSO service dependency on MS SQL
When SSO is installed with local Microsoft SQL Server, the services must start in a specific order.
SSO must start after SQL Server starts. If SSO starts before SQL Server starts, restart the SSO
server after SQL server starts.”

Doing so resolved the issue. To prevent the issue from re-occurring, I made the SSO service dependent on the SQL service.

I don’t understand why this is not part of the automated installation process though 😦

 

 

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Home LAB – How to use Windows 8 Client Hyper-V and VMware Workstation on the same machine

In yesterday’s post I described that for my purposes it was still necessary to run VMware Workstation sometimes despite having Client Hyper-V installed on my Windows 8 machine.

What you have to keep in mind though, is that you’re already running a hypervisor when you have Client Hyper-V installed in Windows 8. Installing and running VMware Workstation might cause problems. So unfortunately you cannot run them at the same time. This is also true for other virtualization products like by example virtualbox.

As a workaround you can either uninstall or (temporarily) disable Hyper-V. When you want to switch between Hyper-V and VMware Workstation it is ofcourse best to just temporarily disable Hyper-V.

In this forum post, a couple of methods are described to (temporarily) disable Hyper-V. It includes creating a seperate boot menu entry to boot with Hyper-V disabled and modifying the setting either through registry or a command. All methods do require a reboot however.

PS:

  • This kind of configuration is ofcourse not supported and should only be used for testing purposes in non production environments.
  • Depending on both your hardware and what your planning to do, you might also want to consider:
    • Running VMware ESXi from a USB stick
    • Running Windows 8 from a USB stick with Windows To Go (WTG).
  • It should also work on Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 and up, but I haven’t tested it.
 

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Powershell – Get Percentage of Pysical and Virtual Servers from your VMware and Cisco UCS combined for each location

In a previous blog post I’ve already shown this script that use PowerCLI to get the percentage of physical and virtual servers from your VMware environment for each Virtual Center server. This script however only took into account ESX hosts and VM’s in each Virtual Center server separately.

This means that:

  • The UCS blades weren’t taken into account as physical servers.
  • No percentage was being calculated for each physical location.

This new script automates determining for each location the number of physical and virtual servers in VMware vSphere and Cisco UCS.

PS: You can get more detailed information from the script, but it has been disabled using comments by default.

 

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PowerShell – Get the percentage of physical and virtual servers from your VMware environment

With the current focus on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) including Green IT, it might be important to know what percentage of servers has been virtualized.

This script I made will use PowerCLI to get the percentage of physical and virtual servers from your VMware environment for each Virtual Center server. You can specify multiple Virtual Center servers if desired.

 

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Free training – Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) hosting 3 virtualization related Jump Starts

Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) is hosting 3 virtualization related Jump Starts in January and February:

  1. Introduction to Hyper-V Jump Start (January 24th, 2013)
  2. Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals Jump Start (January 30th, 2013)
  3. Microsoft Tools for VMware Migration and Integration (Late February)

I’ve attended a couple of Jump Starts including those of Office 365, Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 already and I think it’s a great way to quickly get up-to-date about a subject. Also there’s a great team of people working behind the scenes to answer questions and provide more detailed resources. Other attendees often also share their experiences and provide valuable insights.

The links above provide include a course outline and a link to register for the Jump Start.

I hope to see you there.

 

 
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Posted by on January 14, 2013 in ICT, Learning, Microsoft, Windows, Windows 2012

 

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Home LAB – Virtualization and how to enable nested ESXi and other hypervisors in VMware vSphere 5.1

As a passionate ICT person, I work with multiple virtualization products including Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere.

At home I’m running Server 2012 with Hyper-V in my home lab and even though it works perfectly, I miss the option to be able to run multiple other hypervisors beneath it like by example multiple Hyper-V, VMware ESXi or Citrix XenServer instances.

With VMware products like VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation you can enable this with only a couple of minor adjustments as described in these great articles:

For me personally, I’ll stay with my Hyper-V based home server and my Windows 8 Client with Client Hyper-V installed. For testing purposes however, I’ll have to use VMware Workstation 9 on my Windows 8 machine.  (even though I have Client Hyper-V installed). This way I can still run other hypervisors when needed.

I still hope though that Microsoft will add a similar feature to Hyper-V in the future.

 

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