Dugie’s Pensieve

A new batch of Virtualization resources have been released on Microsoft Downloads over the last couple of days.  I’ve updated the downloads page, and a round-up is below:

• Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 Team Foundation Server (VPC) - 5.8 Gb
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Beta 2 Team Suite (VPC) - 4.9 Gb
• Managing Virtual Server Host Clustering using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 - 20 pages w/ updated HAVM.vbs
• System Center Configuration Manager 2007 VHD - 7.5 Gb
• SC VMM 2007 MP for MOM 2005 - v1.0.2627, 574 Kb
• Server Virtualization MP for SC Ops Mgr 2007 - v1.0.2627, 855 Kb
• White Paper- Virtualization From the Datacenter to the Desktop - 8 pages of shiny markrhitecture
• VM Additions for Linux v2.0, 2.9 Mb
• Hypervisor Functional Specification v0.83, 254 pages

After a day of cutting, glueing and and drilling, the cabinet is beginning to take shape and looking pretty good.

Only this morning, I started with a couple sheets of MDF/plywood and a jigsaw.  By lunchtime I had the outline of an arcade machine:

And this afternoon, I have this:

Not bad for a day’s effort — I’m really impressed with my progress so far.  There are still a few remaining panels to cut out and glue.  We have rain and thunderstorm here in Brisbane at the moment, so trying to keep everything dry is slowing me down.  I’m not sure if I’ll get too much more done this weekend.

I’ll try and do some more during the week after work.  If I make some good progress I’ll jam together another update before I fly out to Seattle on Saturday.

Keep you posted.

A:  Yes, you can use your iPod as storage, to store and run a VHD.  But more on that in just a minute.

Uh-huh, using your Ipod as an external HDD for VHD storage.  How cool is that?!  When I saw Leon’s post about this, it made me chuckle controllably.  So much in fact, I might even go and buy and iPod just to try this!  The only catch is, the iPOD only supports FAT32 as storage.  So if you have a VHD over 4Gb in size, you’ll need workarounds — and the reason for this repost.

Anyway, to copy a larger VHD on FAT32, you will need to split it into smaller chunks.  For the full story read Leon’s post "Splitting a VHD", and a heavily edited snippet is below:

…..We just had to find a way to split the VHD into several smaller chunks (each less than 4GB).

I got bold and downloaded a copy of the official VHD specs from Microsoft. Maybe I could hack together a little tool that would do the job. The only information I could find about splitted VHD’s was this:  The split files do not have any headers or footers, just raw data. The last split file has the footer stored at the end of the file. The first file in the split disk image has an extension of .vhd. The following split files use the .v01, .v02, … filename extension. The split files will be in the same directory as the main hard disk image. The maximum number of split files that can be present is 64

There it was! As it turns out a split VHD is nothing more than just a raw file splitting operation.

So I quickly downloaded a copy of the popular HJSplit file splitting utility and split the U2U VHD into several chunks, using a maximum chunk size of 3.5GB (I could have used a larger chunk size, but I wanted to be on the safe side). I then renamed the chunks, so they matched the pattern required by Virtual PC (i.e. U2U.vhd, U2U.v01, U2U.v02, U2U.v03, …). I copied the chunks to the iPod and created a new Virtual PC instance (.vmc), that used the newly, splitted, VHD. And guess what… It worked! I experimented with several other chunk sizes and it doesn’t really seem to matter what chunk size you choose.

ROFL!  That’s priceless.  Leon, I love your style.

The first step in building my Home Server was decide on an arcade cabinet type (See Update #0 for the story so far).  There are six or seven different types of cabinet (Wikipedia has the complete list) - but I wanted an upright cabinet.

My original plan was to buy a second hand arcade machine, and refurbish it.  As it turned out, buying a second hand cabinet is not that easy in Australia.  Most machines were ~$800+, or pickup only from Sydney (which is 12 hours drive away).

So I decided instead to make my own, with a self imposed budget of $500 AUD.

After a bit of research, I found out quickly, that the arcade controls, can be a time consuming pain in the ass if you don’t know what you’re doing - I admit, I don’t know what I’m doing, so I bought the pre made arcade controls from Xarcade.  Good choice I thought :)

Side Note:  Strangely enough, you just don’t see old school arcade machines anymore, nowadays they tend to be car racing simulators, so measuring up an existing cabinet wasn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be.

I ended up taking a ride to a laundromat out near Ballina just get “hands on” and old arcade machine — I probably didn’t need to, but I knew there was one there, and it was a great excuse to go for a ride :)

 Getting Dimensions, via Google.

• In the end it was just me and google, trawling the web looking for resources
• Getting dimensions was tough - most sites have 404s or just not there anymore.
• I found wiki.arcadecontrols.com, a great place to look around for ideas
• 1.8 m high seems to be the normal height — deluxe cabinets are 2.2 m high (and too expensive for timber)
• If found Jeff McClain’s page a great site for ideas
• and decided on using on Pier’s dimensions
• As for the cabinet width; measure the width of your doors and where you want to put it inside.   No point building it if it wont go inside =)
• My width is 700 mm  

Tracing the Cabinet

• I sketched a couple of plans onto sheets of timber - get a feel for what it would like.
• And make sure the monitor would fit
• For personal preference I moved 77.56 a bit higher, so it was above my knee
• I flattened 60.106 a little bit, to fit the premade controls

Now it all looks, pretty good, so I’m off to starting cutting it out!

Yeah we all know Virtual Machines rocks.  Jeff Atwood over at codinghorror.com just moved hosting providers and hardware, and it was the easiest move he’s ever done.  It was as simple as:  shut down the VM | compacted and compressed it | transferred it to the new server | booted it up again | Change IP Address

If your not already reading his blog, you can check out his full post "Virtual Machine Server Hosting", and a snippet is below:

All I had to do was change the IP address in the VM and I was up and running as if nothing had changed. That’s the easiest server migration I’ve ever experienced, all thanks to virtualization.

Phil and I are both Windows ecosystem developers, so we went with what we knew. But virtualization provides total flexibility. I could spin up a new Linux server at a moment’s notice if I decided to switch this blog over to the LAMP stack. Or I could play with the latest release candidate of Windows Server 2008. And they can all run in parallel, assuming we have enough memory. That’s what I love most about virtualization– the freedom.

Although Phil and I share admin access to the host machine, we have our own private playgrounds in our virtual servers. We’re completely isolated from each other’s peculiarities and weirdnesses: nothing we do (well, almost nothing) can affect the other person’s virtual machine. Reboot? No problem. Install some stupid software I can’t stand? Go for it. Format the drive and start over? Don’t care. It’s your machine. Do whatever.

I’m reading the spec now, so until then (and you download your copy) read Ben’s post, "Hypervisor API available under the Open Specification Promise" - a snippet is below:  :)

So you may be thinking "Cool, but why do I care?  Why does anyone care?" - and those are good questions.  Leaving aside the boring (to someone like me) discussion of just what it means to release something under the OSP and all the related licensing questions (click on the OSP link above if you want to read about that), let’s talk about why you would want to use the hypercall API.

First - if you are developing software that could utilize a hypervisor, this is for you!  

*cough*  <<insert sound of crickets>>  *cough*

Okay, I get that there aren’t many people out there who would actually do this - but there are such people and this is important to them.  On a side note you do not need to be creating traditional "virtualization" software to utilize the hypervisor.  If you are doing low-level coding and are looking for another way to isolate your code at runtime - go check it out.

Second - if you are writing an operating system, this is for you!

*cough*

Umm… Okay - not really off to a good start here.  But, for people who are developing operating systems this interface allows them to understand how to extend their OS to take advantage of the services provided by the Windows Server virtualization hypervisor.

Third - if you like reading boring technical specifications, this is for you!

Anyone?

…

Fine.  Let’s be serious then.  Chances are that you personally do not care much about this announcement, but the really cool thing is that it allows a number of our partners to develop cool technology on top of, and that inter-operates with, the Windows Server virtualization hypervisor.  I personally can’t wait to see what sort of technology is developed here.

The Virtual Machine Additions for Linux have now been set free :)

Previously on connect.microsoft.com they  appeared on Microsoft Downloads yesterday. 

The Linux additions are packaged as a MSI, and once installed on the host make an ISO and readme available in the directory:  Microsoft Virtual Server\Virtual Machine Additions\

…so don’t get excited when you see 32 bit and 64 bit additions :)

You can download the VM Additions for Linux and just remember the SCSI hard disk Virtual Machine Additions component requires Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1).

Ok, so some of you jumped the gun and have asked what the pet project is.  Well the short answer is:  I’m building a Microsoft Home Server, cause I’m at a point in my life where I need the remote access, storage and the backups. 

No before you go "Oh pleeeeaazzzeee!", I’m following Doc Emmett Brown’s advice:  The way I see it, if you’re gonna build a home server , why not do it with some style?  

So my home server "ultimate case mod", is a replica  arcade machine.  Sure it’s not as small and sexy as well blogged Home server prototype, but it’s got other appeal - and it’s an tribute to my interests in virtualization.

Think about it, it’s perfect:  Lot’s of room for drives and big fans for cooling, UPS, and storage of other stuff.  I’ll be spending particular care, to make this machine as silent as possible too.

I’m picking up the wood on the weekend, the arcade controls arrived last week, the 21" monitor is out of storage.

This will be the first post of many, as I’ll be blogging everything as I go along.  I plan need to have it finished by Christmas.  Thanks to mame-arcade for the sample photo of their arcade machine, until mine starts to take shape.

Anyway, there is lots more to do, but I’ll save that for another post.  Now the interesting question is, does anyone know the subtle link between an arcade machine and Windows virtualization — and no, Ben you are not allowed to tell :)

I still get the occasional email from people asking about my "Media Center story".  My MCE took about a month to plan (thanks must go to Stephen Ed, and all the folks over at XP Media Center forum), a couple of days to purchase, and a weekend to build, and has been faithfully online since October 2005.

In summary, the media center has changed the way my family lives.  We now have a complete ban on live TV in our house - this means we actually watch more television, but we spend less time watching the TV.  We also listen to more music, take more photos and short videos, and the best bit:  spend more time looking at videos and photos of family.

So here is a cleaned repost, of my current configuration, and how I got there..

Read the rest of this entry »

I was reading Long’s blog (and you should too) when I read an interesting snippet about Microsoft’s distinguished engineer Eric Traut, the next version of windows after vista, and hypervisors:

…whilst the presentation is not directly about Windows 7, it does contain a demonstration of MinWin [only ~25Meg] - an internal project to build the most efficient Windows kernel which will in turn be used in Windows 7.

…The whole presentation (WMV) goes for approximately 1 hour and includes a very deep look into hypervisors. I’ve clipped out the 8-minute segment which Eric focuses on Windows 7 specifically to make it easier to watch. Because Eric goes into a lot of detail as well as background information about what is presented, and because it’s 2AM, I won’t regurgitate it. All I’ll say is that if you think Windows at its core is bloated, think again.

I’m currently watching the 8 minute, Long has snipped out, and I’m downloading the whole presentation (140Mb).   I’ll post back when I’ve finished watching the full clip.

UPDATE:  Obviously there is a huge interest, because Long has had to take video’s offline in a cute way.  ..but they’ll be back.