Webs’ Random Ideas

Something I forced myself into, not really what I wanted to do. Below is the troubles I found and what I did to fix issues.

First the problem… Upgraded to a new mobo with Nvidia chipset. Not a big deal but the new ones have a new system for managing SATA ports. Rather than treating all SATA ports as independent ports and letting the user configure to his/her content, the new Nvidia system is to have the first 3 or 4 ports act as individual SATA ports and the last 2 as RAID ports. Now you can use the last two ports outside of RAID but only if you run ALL the SATA ports in AHCI mode. If you run ALL the ports in regular SATA mode then you can only use the first 3.

What’s the big deal? I have 4 hard drives that need to be independent of each other because three of them are used for a file server. So this new mobo I have kind of put me in a bad position. Luckily I created the file server in VM because I was worried about changing hardware and hard drives down the road and wanted a system that would be robust. Anyway, I figured a mobo with 5 SATA ports would give me what I need. So frustrated and broken after hours of pain I set my mobo to AHCI. Vista would not install. No matter what I did Vista did not like AHCI mode. It would allow me to do SATA mode, but I needed all 4 hard drives.

So I ran in AHCI and installed Linux (funny thing, Linux could care less what mode my SATA ports ran in as it took all three, Vista only took SATA mode). Once installed I ran updates and rebooted and installed VMWare Server. Follow this badass guide for doing this too. Once this is done you can run VMWare, I also recommend creating a test VM to play around and make sure VMWare works for you in Linux.

The next thing I had to do was add my hard drive with my 11 VMs to VMWare. In VMWare you need a place to store the VMs. I do this with a separate physical disk. Not a bid deal, but it wasn’t mounted in Linux so I didn’t know what to add to VMWare. So I installed pysdm. Copy the code below into a terminal window:

sudo apt-get install pysdm

Once installed run pysdm with the following:

sudo pysdm

Then you can mount and configure your mounted drives as necessary. The other issue for me was that my drives are NTFS drives so I had to make sure things were setup correctly. So I clicked the sideways triangle thing next to the drive I wanted to mount and clicked the listing under it (this is the partition Linux recognized). Then click assistance and below is a screen capture of my settings:

After hitting okay on the screen above, you should be back to the main screen. At this point I had to make sure “rw” showed up under options toward the beginning of the line. For some reason “ro” was showing. This means the hard drive is being mounted as read only, not good. So if necessary change this right on the options line.

Once you have mounted the drives and applied the settings copy the location from pysdm. Now we need to try navigating to these mounted drives. Open “Computer” by going to “Places” (at the top of the taskbar up top on Ubuntu’s taskbar) and then click “Computer”. By default Computer will not show you the actual location, but just folder names on its taskbar. Click the icon that looks like a notepad with a pen on the left of the window under the first two taskbars. This should show you the full location of the folder you are viewing. Paste in the location you copied from pysdm.

If you can view the files success! I made it this far, but getting my FreeNAS system back up in running without losing any files is still a big step…

Copy your file server (FreeNAS in my case) folder in your drive or folder that holds your VMs. Copying your VM folder is a last resort fail safe. I just copied the folder and then pasted it in the same location which creates a folder with all the same files, but a different folder name. If you screw up you can just copy the files from the backup to start out from scratch again. I had to use it a bunch of times.

Open your folder with the VM you are fixing. Find the VMX file and open it in gedit. This file is the config file for VMWare. It holds everything about the VM in it. I followed this guide to figure out what I needed to change. Lets open the file and take a look:

gedit FreeNAS64.vmx

Notice that right off the bat the top of the file has a line showing it is configured for Windows. Make sure you see the following at the top (for me it was the second line):

.encoding = “UTF-8″

Then you will need to delete any locked files according to this guide. Look for files with “.lck” at the end. Delete them.

Once done add the VM from the webapp for VMWare and power it on. When I did I jumped up and down for like 5 minutes. Seriously I have like a couple hundred gigs of files and lost none of it!! Everything came back up

Just follow a similar process to get your other VMs up and running.

I got it working!! For users with VMware server my steps for using OVA files are as follows:

1. Download/install/run VMware vCenter Converter (I also recommend to just install the standalone)
2. Click on the icon to “Convert Machine” or go File, New,”Convert Machine”
3. In the wizard that pops up, select “Virtual Appliance” and browse to the “.OVA” file. Hit next and next again.
4. Choose “VMware Workstation or other VMware virtual machine” from the first drop down.
5. For the second drop down choose your VMware product, in my case it was “VMware Server 2.x”
6. Browse to your location where you keep your VMs and hit next.
7. Edit or change any options you like, I left mine at defaults.
8. Then next your way through till it runs. You should be taken back to the main screen and the status will show as “Completed” when it’s done.

Once done you can add the VM using the server management interface just like you would any other appliance. The OVA file appears to be nothing more than a package for VMs similar to how ZIP files are used.

I was able to figure this out thanks to a commentator on VMware forums named Tim F. Thanks Tim!