Simple to Time Consuming

Posted on February 24, 2007 No Comments

You ever start what seems to be a simple little project, only to get sucked into a series of events that consumes the next few hours? I did that twice today. Man, I’m beat.

First one: I have a development server at work that was initially prototyped on a very old PIII 500 with a 20GB drive. Over time it became a core piece to a lot of our development (and demos) and losing it would be a disaster. To give an idea of how temporary this thing originally was, it sits headless under my desk… you can imagine the elegant backup plans for it…

I was in the office this morning to do a server upgrade and heard some ugly “pulsating” power supply fan noise from it. Seemed like a good time to finally try converting a physical machine to a virtual machine with VMware Converter. I’d previously read up on the process (amusingly, this was the machine I had in mind already) and didn’t think it looked too tough. And it wasn’t. 40 minutes later I had a virtual version of my server! Well, it lost some static network stuff, but that was quickly fixed.

Then I decided to get fancy: VMware Server can be configured to automatically start virtual “guest” machines when the main server starts. But you need to define the process owner. Well, the first option is the local system account, so for my new machine I set that and left the other ones alone. Rebooted to give it a try.

Stuff started getting weird. VMware services were tossing errors or not responding. Couldn’t get the other guest machines started. I finally decided to set the other machines to run as the same user, but that seemed to make things worse! My VMware server management console actually locked up multiple times. Finally, I just set the process owners to be the domain admin and *presto* everything stabilized and got back to normal.

How long did I blow on that? 3 hours. Good grief. I’m sure there’s more elegant ways to handle it, but for now I’ll stick with what worked. I’ll be building a dedicated VMware Server host very soon and I’ll experiment more on that one.

I’d write about the second time this happened today, but then this post would probably be the third! More later instead.