Fast way to resize a virtual disk with VMware ESX Server

We’re starting some SharePoint development and I needed to create a development environment on Windows Server 2003.  So I created a new virtual machine (VM) of Server 2003 on our VMware ESX box and gave it a 1GB of RAM and 8GB of disk space.  I installed the OS and configured it for Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and then installed Visual Studio 2008.  That left us with about 1.5GB of disk space.  Oops, time to resize the drive.

The beauty of working with virtual machines is that it’s relatively easy to increase or decrease the memory and disk storage.  In this case, I wanted to add another 4GB to the virtual disk.  I powered down the virtual machine and went into the “Virtual Machine Properties” from the VMware Infrastructure Client (VIC).  I selected the hard drive and it provided a entry field for the new size.  I increased the size to 12GB, adding an additional 4GB.

That takes us part way there.  I increased the size if the virtual disk from 8GB to 12GB, but it still has an 8GB partition, the OS wont see the additional space.  I saw all some tips on that Series of Tubes that recommended downloading Linux boot disks and boot the the VM from the Linux CD images as an .ISO file.

Meh, that’s too much work.  I took a simpler path.  I powered down another Server 2003 VM that was already running on the ESX box and added new VM’s virtual disk as a second virtual drive.  I booted up the second VM and opened up a command shell.  From the command shell, I ran the diskpart utility to extend the partition.  I did the following commands through diskpart:

diskpart

Microsoft DiskPart version 5.1.3565
          
Copyright (C) 1999-2003 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: XXXXX

DISKPART> list volume
 
  Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info
  ----------  ---  -----------  -----  ----------  -------  ---------  --------
  Volume 0     E                       DVD-ROM         0 B
  Volume 1     C                NTFS   Partition     12 GB  Healthy    Boot
  Volume 2     D                NTFS   Partition    8 GB  Healthy

 
 
DISKPART> select volume 2 
  
Volume 2 is the selected volume.
  
DISKPART> extend
 
DISKPART> exit
       
Leaving DiskPart...

I basically typed that in from memory, some of the numbers may be off, but it shows how to extend the size of the partition.  After exiting out of diskpart, I then shut down the second VM.  Next, I removed the virtual drive that belongs to the new VM.  Remember to select remove only and not remove and delete.  At this point I was able to power both VM’s back up.  The second VM will be slightly confused about the missing drive, but it was back to normal.  The new VM took some time to check out the resized partition after I logged back in.  With my VM, it declared it to be new hardware and wanted to reboot.  After it rebooted, it was happy and recognized that it had a 12GB partition.

Enabling users with ESX 3.5.0

I've been playing admin on our shiny new ESX server and it's been a struggle trying to get the user accounts configured.  I wanted to give our QA staff enough rights to login through the VMware Web Access portal so that they could start and stop their virtual machines.  I figured I would just set up their accounts and put them in the "Virtual Machine User" role.  No of the accounts could login in.  They kept getting the dreaded "Login failed due to a bad username or password."

I dug around a bit and started searching the VMware forums.  Apparently everyone was using AD to authenticate their user accounts.  I wasn't planning using AD because we are going to be changing domains in the near future, but I figured nothing else was working, it couldn't hurt.  This message led me to a very useful post by Geert Baeke on how to integrate Active Directory with ESX 3.   There was a lot of useful stuff in that post, but the part that I needed came down to this:

esxcfg-auth --enablead --addomain=domain.com --addc=domain.com

The VMware document uses the FQDN of a domain controller for the --addc parameter, but you can use the FQDN of the domain. That way, DNS is used to find domain controllers and use one of those. The command above modifies a few files like /etc/krb5.conf and also the system-auth file in /etc/pam.d. The ESX firewall is also automatically configured to open the needed ports for AD authentication.

Before you can logon with an AD account, you need to create a console user on the ESX box that has the same name as your AD account. For example, if you have an AD account domain\esxadmin, you need to add a user to the ESX console called esxadmin. The command to use is useradd esxadmin. You can also use VI Client to create the user. You can now logon with the account and use the AD password. I tested this with ESX 3.0.1 servers against Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 domains and it worked as advertised.

I did it and it worked like a charm.  Life is good.

Two of my favorite geek toys (PowerShell and VMWare) playing together

I can't wait to get the VI Toolkit for Windows.  It's PowerShell cmdlets that let you manage VMWare.  To get an idea of what you can do with PowerShell and ESX Server, check out the Automating VMware with PowerShell Lab Manual, from the VMworld Europe 2008 conference.  You will be able monitor the status of VM's on the ESX server and be able to control the VM's remotely.  I'm curious to see of you would be able to take a running VM offline and move it to a storage volume.  That would make my life easier.

The VI PowerShell Blog mentioned that the VI Toolkit will be Beta this month, I can't wait to get a hold of it.

Fun with changing the IP address of ESX Server 3.5

We (our IT manager and myself) have been having some fun with out shiny new VMWare ESX 3.5 server.  We have had it running for about two weeks now and we decided to change it's IP address.  The ESX server was on the same subnet as our LAN.  This meant that it the virtual machines were taking IP addresses out of a pool that was needed for our physical computers.  There were some other security issues, so we decided to put it on it's own subnet.

It was fairly easy to change the IP address address via the command line (this site helped a lot), the fun started with the NFS connection.  We are using NFS to mount a folder located on a Windows file server to add some offline storage for the ESX box.  To mount with NFS, you have to create a VMKernel in the ESX networking and the VMKernel gets it's own IP address.  That IP address must be on the same subnet as the NFS server.

When we moved the ESX to it's own subnet, we put it on it's own physical network and that broke the NFS connection.  We tried a few things and then we checked the Windows box that was running the NFS server.  It had two network cards.  The second one was not enabled, but fully functional.  We enabled it and set it's IP address to the subnet of the ESX box.  I had to drop and recreate the NFS mount, but it all worked.

While testing the networking, the IT manager was running one of the virtual machines (XP 64-bit) and set the network adapter in the VM to a static IP address.   It turned out he set it to the IP address of the ESX server.  That's when the fun started.  When you connected to the VM, ESX would lose it's connection and you lost control over ESX and the VM.  After a minute or two, you could access ESX through the VMWare Infrastructure Client, but you couldn't access the VM to change it's IP address.

We racked our brains trying to figure out how to get control of the VM to reset it's IP address.  The fix turned out to be really simple.  I powered down the VM from VIC and edited it's hardware settings.  I added a second network adapter (it's all virtual) and set the first one to be disconnected.  I powered the VM back up and the new adapter had a safe IP address.  I connected to the VM's console and opened up "Network Connections" in Windows.  The first adapter was enabled, but not connected.  I opened up it's properties and set it to grab an IP through DHCP.

I powered down the VM, removed the second adapter, and reconnected the first one.  I rebooted the VM and it had a new IP address.  Peace and harmony reigned through my virtual kingdom.