We’ve been virtualising Exchange Server 2007 since it was first released but this week Microsoft has announced their official support policies for virtualised Exchange environments.  It is a bit heavy on the Hyper-V but also references the list of support partners for non-Microsoft hardware virtualisation.  When I checked this earlier in the week VMWare was a notable absence but today Dugie confirmed for me that they’ve been added to the list, which now stands as follows:

• Cisco Systems, Inc.
• Citrix Systems, Inc.
• Novell, Inc.
• Sun Microsystems
• Unisys Corp.
• Virtual Iron Software
• VMware, Inc.

If you’re planning an Exchange Server 2007 deployment using a virtualisation platform be sure to read Microsoft’s recommendations for sizing virtual machines.

I saw Dan’s post on this subject and did a little Googling and lo and behold, VMWare have announced that their ESXi product will be released for free.

I’m no VMWare guy like these guys , but as I understand it ESXi is the skinny little hypervisor (clocking in at 32mb) that lets you run virtual guest operating systems.  So you could buy yourself a server with a few cores, lots of RAM, some disk (hey maybe even use iSCSI for storage ) and run lots of virtual servers within that environment.

How can they be releasing something so good for free?  Well they’ve done it before, releasing the successor to VMWare GSX Server called VMWare Server for free a few years ago.  This was awesome for IT pros who rely on virtualisation to run labs when they are doing training.  And now with ESXi we’ll be able to do it even easier (VMWare Server still requires you to install an OS like Windows first, whereas ESXi is the OS - so to speak).

Aside from having done this before, VMWare says the bulk of their revenues come from sales of their Virtual Infrastructure suite (the bits that let you run clusters of ESX servers, do failover of guests between hosts, resource management etc).  So basically they can afford to give away the basic bits (run virtual guests on a single host) for free.

You can’t argue with this Dan.

Source

I’ve scored myself a gutsy server with VMWare ESX 3.5 running on it and have been toying with it a little tonight. I’m fortunate to work right next to some of the world’s finest VMWare specialists, some even scoring as much as 70% on their VCP exam. One of them also writes a blog from time to time, which is lucky because I’ve spent some time on there this evening, particularly this post on the suite of esxcfg- commands available.

Opening ports for Veeam FastSCP

I guess having used ESX servers that Dan has configured before I just assumed this would work straight away. I was wrong. I checked every possible thing I could think of with my Windows XP machine before realising that FastSCP was banging away on port 2500 and that wasn’t open on the ESX host.

[root@esx firewall]# esxcfg-firewall -o 2500,tcp,in,FastSCP
[root@esx firewall]# service firewall restart
Stopping firewall                                          [  OK  ]
Starting firewall                                          [  OK  ]
[root@esx firewall]#

Thats after trying for a while to work out how to open a port range. Editing /etc/vmware/firewall/services.xml as suggested here didn’t seem to work.

Letting root logon to SSH

Security? Bah. Laziness wins in the lab.

1. Create some other user you can logon with
2. Switch to root with su - root
3. Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config with Vi
4. Find the line PermitRootAccess no to PermitRootAccess yes
5. Save and exit Vi
6. Restart SSH daemon with service sshd restart

Probably nasty ways of doing it, but they work!