Voice of the DBA

Tag: virtualization

  • Hyper-V Guests

    Virtualization has really changed the way that we deal with software. It seems that more and more often I find people using virtualization for all sorts of systems, both production and non-production servers. The ability to run multiple operating systems on a single physical host means that systems are used more efficiently. It also means that more people have the ability to experiment with alternatives to the standard Windows OS that so many of us use.

    Hyper-V has gained a lot of attention over the last few years as Microsoft has tried to get people to run this hypervisor.  It seems that quite a few people have had success running Hyper-V, and it becomes more popular all the time. However, not everyone is happy, and I found a  post about Linux support in Hyper-V, or the lack thereof.

    Whether Microsoft is mis-representing their support is one thing, but this did have me thinking about a wider issue. As we build more and more systems that are virtualized, or even composed of services offered by other vendors, to what extent should the vendor provide support? Is it reasonable to say that your platform works with software x, y, and z, even if you don’t have engineers trained to support the software?

    This could become a large pain point in the future for other types of platforms, as I am sure it will continue to be an issue with hypervisors.  I’m not sure I would expect a hypervisor vendor to offer full  support for various guest operating systems, but I certainly would expect that they would work with engineers at other companies to solve issues, especially if I have a support contract.

    Steve Jones

  • Cloning Virtual Box Images in Windows 7

    I use VirtualBox from Sun to do SQL testing since it supports 64-bit guest images, which I want need for some things, like Windows 2008 R2, which only comes in x64.

    However I hate reinstalling stuff that I don’t need to. And with a multitude of SQL versions, and a question today on eval edition (which I never install), I wanted to be sure I could quickly setup a new image when needed. In older VM software, I’ve just copied a VHD disk image and then added a new VM with it. However it’s not as simple with Virtual Box.

    I found a nice procedure from Stuart’s Notes on cloning and copying images, so I started there, but found a few differences on my machine, so here’s what I did.

    Found my Virtual Box files, which are located at: C:\Users\Steve\.VirtualBox\HardDisks (note, this is different than Stuart’s procedure. This is where things were installed on my Windows 7 x64 machine. I don’t have a “VDI” folder.

    In Windows, you can right click this in the Explorer and get the path. I then pasted that with a “CD” in front of it in a command prompt.

    VirtualBox1

    Next I grabbed the path to the Virtual Box installation, since I need to run the “vboxmanage.exe” program. For me, the path was “C:\Program Files\Sun\VirtualBox”

    VirtualBox2  At this point, I essentially needed to run

    vboxmanage clonevdi  “Old Disk" "new disk"

    That, however, doesn’t really work easily in Windows. Instead, you need pathing, quotes, and other things to ensure that you get a copy. I had to run this:

    C:\Users\Steve\.VirtualBox\HardDisks>"C:\Program Files\Sun\VirtualBox\vboxmanage
    " clonevdi  "Win7 64.vdi" "Win7 SQL 2K.vdi"

    This completed, with these results:

    VirtualBox7

    From there, I fired  up Virtual Box, and created a new machine. I named it picked the old OS, and then got to the Virtual Disk dialog:

    VirtualBox3

    I clicked the button that has the arrow in the image. This brings up the disk selection dialog. I clicked “Add”

    VirtualBox4

    From there, the next step was to select my new disk image:

    VirtualBox5

    I picked it, then closed the dialog and I saw this image listed for my VM.

    VirtualBox6

    Complete the wizard, click start, and I had a clone of my virtual machine, same state, guest additions installed, and same pwd. I changed the background for my guest and then installed the software I needed on this one.