Solo Technology

I’ve been tasked with planning and testing a series of infrastructure changes and upgrades. To make some of the testing easier and less disruptive, I’ve been using a couple of VMware products. Sure, I’ve mentioned them here before, but I’ve never spent this much time with them and I’ve really grown to appreciate them this week. Kind of like “gateway tech”; I suspect I’ll be sold on buying the commercial stuff soon!

VMware Server (free) is just about the slickest thing since sliced bread. I have this installed on one of our larger servers and use it to host a handful of virtual “lab” servers that I use to test product and OS upgrades. The neat thing is the virtual machines can be configured to stop and start along with the physical or “host” machine. There’s a little VMware server console app that can be installed on any machine and is used to get to the console of the virtual machines or start, stop, manage settings, etc. It even works over VPN (albeit a bit slowly).

So, I have a handful of virtual servers that I control from my laptop, but all the heavy lifting is really going on back on the host server. Truly awesome. I also setup Terminal Services on all those virtual servers so I can just remote into them just like any other box on the network. No need to always run them from the VMware console.

What takes that all up a notch is VMware’s Converter (also free). I started this project by creating a Windows 2000 server and a Windows 2003 Standard Server. Both are fully service-packed and with all necessary updates already applied. Now, whenever I need a new lab server I just run the converter and clone one of those two baseline machines. As part of the process I can give the cloned machine a new name, put it in the right domain and address licensing (via the wonders of integrating with MS Migration tools like Sysprep). So yeah, I can have a new server up and going in under 10 minutes. Sweet.

I learned that VMware “snapshots” are cool, but each time you take a snapshot of a machine, it replaces the prior one. Just one per machine… well hell, I thought I had a series of them so imagine my chagrin when I wanted to restore to an older snapshot. Whoops.

What else have I learned? I’ve learned there’s some things to like about Microsoft SQL Server 2005 — but it truly blows at copying databases from SQL Server 2000. I’ve lost hours on work-arounds today and am about ready to just lob my computer out the window. Tomorrow’s going to be a “Google day,” I can see. I need a fresh copy of my database to continue testing and I hope I don’t have to resort to scripts… With 2000’s Enterprise Manager this is a no-brainer. But Enterprise Manager isn’t allowed to connect to 2005 instances. If you have fought this battle before, I’m all ears.

SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 came out just as I finished regression testing. *mutter* I grabbed it hoping that the database copy thing was improved. If it was, I’m not seeing it.

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