Migrating Virtual Machines from Xenserver to Hyper-V

For a particular project I have recently been looking at migrating a number of current Xen virtual machines to Microsoft's Hyper-V offering. Although this should have been easy, it turned out to be far from this, and I therefore thought it would be worth documenting it for future use. It is a bit of a rough and quick post, so apologies for that, but hopefully it will benefit somebody.

Starting off, Hyper-V does not allow the import of either the Citrix .xva format or the .ovf format. This means you have to use the Citrix project Kensho tool. I did quite a bit of research but could not find any other tool or any other way of doing it. Although it looks easy, Kensho has a few requirements and gotcha's which will probably be resolved in future versions (I used version 1.3). Provided you stick to the documentation (which I did the second time around after abject failure the first time) the process should be easy and intuitive. Just remember to turn off all firewalls and to enable WinRM on your Hyper-V servers. You will need to run around 5 commands to do this and to allow access from the Kensho install.

Once this is done the process of migration should have been straightforward, and for Windows VM's it was. For RedHat Linux ones (5.3) however, it was a completely different story.

Although each Linux VM is likely to be different, the following bits helped me:

1. Install a stock kernel and once you have booted from this, remove Xen specific kernels
2. Remove Xen tools before migrating
3. Migrate and boot
   
4. If your Linux VM hangs on boot, restore /etc/inittab to a default one to make sure the console settings are correct. If you cannot get into your VM mount the install CD and boot into "Linux rescue" mode. Your root file system should be auto mounted for you and you should have a subset of tools available to edit configuration files.
   
5. Install Hyper-V integration components (copy files onto the box into a writeable location, important! and run the install script)
6. At this point my VM refused to boot again, until I remove the following argument from /etc/grub.conf ----- hda=noprobe hdb=noprobe
7. Edit network settings, your new network adapter will be called ifcfg-seth0.
   
8. Now all is well and my migrated VM can participate in the Hyper-V cluster. Make sure you have a fixed MAC address rather than a dynamically generated one, you can change this in the VM settings in Hyper-V manager.
   

Although this is by no means a complete guide I hope it provides you with some pointers of issues you can run into, drop me a line if any of these need clarification and I will see if I can help. All in all it is a bit of a pain and you have to wonder how much trust you can have in the stability of your migrated VM. In our case it might be easier to rebuild them with a 64-bit OS to make use of the additional memory we will have available on our VM platform.

New Years Resolution. Quitting Smoking - The Gadgeteers way

Those who know me know I smoke. This year however, I have taken a different approach to my usual attempt to quit my habit.

I spent allot of time reading with interest articles on alternate ways to quit smoking and came across E-Cigarettes when visiting "The Gadget Show Live 2009" in the NEC in Birmingham. I wont go into the details, you can read about the definition of it Here . Whilst the device I purchased didn't give me what I needed, I saw potential so started to research a bit more. I discovered a whole industry had arisen around vaping from the devices you can purchase to the flavours of liquid you could buy. I settled on a "510" type device,
and found that it actually worked for me. Whilst I didn't immediately move away from smoking at first, I decided to take the plunge during Xmas 2009. Over a month in and I haven't smoked normal cigarettes at all.

If you are a smoker and are interested in this, then feel free to check out some of the links below. Also at the bottom of the Blog is a link direct to "Totally Wicked E-Liquids site" which will give a 7.5% discount to you at checkout OR you can use the code LF10 for a 10% discount @ Liberty Flights E-Cigs. I am not promoting this to non-smokers .. please DON'T DO IT. However if you want to try and quit or want to move away from smoking cigarettes then this is worth a try.

Liberty Flights E-Cigs

Totally Wicked E-Liquid

This method will not work for every smoker, but having tried most normal methods for quitting, this has so far been the most successful for me.
Whats the appeal versus real cigarettes ? Well, I get my nicotine fix still, I don't stink, I feel better, my family is happier and these things aren't as harmful as Cigarettes. Google is your friend if you want to look into this.

I've also found some friendly communities of like minded people through some of the forums out there and discovered a nice support network in the process as well.. So far, all in all a positive experience. Forum links below.

Liberty Flights Forums

UK Vapers Forums

Totally Wicked E-Cig Forums

CHANGES ARE AFOOT HOWEVER

The MRHA (UK equivalent of the US FDA) is looking ( on behalf of our government) to "regulate" the use of Nicotine in recreational products. This could potentially be very bad for the "Vaping" industry as a whole. I can understand some of the reasons behind it, but my concern is that there will be an outright ban on said products without any thought for people who are using them as a very good form of NRT ( Nicotine replacement Therapy). This is a current hot topic for most of the forums above. Obviously lots of people have their own opinions on what is actually happening, but interestingly enough, nearly all of those people don't want to see our alternative method of smoking being made illegal. We will see what happens, but don't let it put you off trying to get away from the "evil" weed :)

Thanks for reading this one.