Installing ESXi/vCenter/vSphere Client on /x32x64 Server/WinXP

First of all, i gotta warn you this is not tutorial about how to install VMWare components but it is about its architecture.

I have couple of x32 Xeon based servers sitting in my Lab, i'd like them to turn into something more handy and powerful. That's because i started to research about how to combine and bind them in a Virtual machine like a Cloud Computing environment.

VMware offers what i'm looking for but there is some problems with my x32 based CPUs. VMware only supports 32bit servers with ESXi 3.5 without a license, however my servers are not supported that version of ESXi, my servers supported by ESX 3.x.x which are license required, so i had to give up and go with VMware Server 2.0 and it fits well nad i gotta say my RHEL5 OS can compute with ESXi's memory comsumption with a good way.

Then i tried out ESXi 4.0 in a x64 server, actually i created a cluster with 2 servers and put a vCenter one of my Windows XP PCs, it worked as charmed. You can manage your servers one by one via vSphere Client, or as i've done, you install a vCenter and connect it via vSphere Client and manage all the host server from there.

I'll update this post

Typhoon Master

How to install VMware Server 2.0 on RHEL5

VMware products are very well documented and easy to use, cause of this i'm not going to explain all the installation that i've done but share some tricks with you.

- My RHEL5 server has dual NICs and it has bond0 as a network interface, after installing vmware server wit rpm -ivh VMware-server-2.0.1-156745.i386.rpm , you're going to need to configure it with vmware-config.pl and this perl scripts guide to configure host server system. I didn't realize it offered mt eth0 as primary NIC and i had some trouble with accessing network from guest OS, then i realize i didn't pick the correct NIC, so please remember you need to select bond0 as your primary host NIC if you have more than 1 NIC on your server.

In additionally,

I had an idea that about installing VMware Server to my Sun N240 server which has Debian Sparc on it. Unfortunatly VMware server does not support Sparc CPU as virtulizer. However i installed the server but couldn't achieve start it because of the CPU. Keep that mind, VMware Server doesn't support Sparc or Power CPU architectures as virtualizer.

Cheers

Typhoon Master

How to install Bind9 as ENUM Server

How to install BIND9 as ENUM Server on Ubuntu

Why do you need an ENUM server?

ENUM server works like DNS server but it matches Phone number with SIP URI instead of IP and URL. Some IMS Core systems use this kind of resolutions.

Installing BIND9

I'm going to explain this for Ubuntu Server, it is quite easy to install but tricky to configure at the begining.

1) apt-get install bind9

2) After installation succefully completed, go to /etc/bind/ directory. You need to edit following files only.

named.conf

named.conf.options

named.conf.enum (actually we will create it in next step)

db.e164.arpa (actually we will create it in next step)

3) named.conf

add following line

include "/etc/bind/named.conf.enum";

4) named.conf.enum

add following line

zone "e164.arpa" {

type master;

file "/etc/bind/db.e164.arpa";

};

5) db.e164.arpa

$TTL 86400

e164.arpa. IN SOA ns.e164.arpa. root.e164.arpa. (

2004011522 ; Serial no., based on date

21600 ; Refresh after 6 hours

3600 ; Retry after 1 hour

604800 ; Expire after 7 days

3600 ; Minimum TTL of 1 hour

)

e164.arpa. 43200 IN NS ns.e164.arpa.

;

ns.e164.arpa. 43200 IN A 192.168.1.2

0.9.8.7.6.5.4.3.2.1.e164.arpa. NAPTR 10 100 "u" "E2U+sip" "!^.*$!sip:info@example.com!".

0.9.8.7.6.5.4.3.2.1.e164.arpa. NAPTR 10 101 "u" "E2U+h323" "!^.*$!h323:info@example.com!".

0.9.8.7.6.5.4.3.2.1.e164.arpa. NAPTR 10 102 "u" "E2U+msg" "!^.*$!mailto:info@example.com!".

8.1.2.7.5.9.3.3.1.6.1.e164.arpa. NAPTR 100 10 "U" "SIP+E2U" "!^.*$!sip:16133957218@example.com!".

6) named.conf.options

#logging {

# channel query-log {

# file "/var/log/query-log" versions 2 size 10m;

# print-time yes;

# print-category yes;

# };

# category queries { query-log; } ;

#};

#

#options {

# directory "/var/cache/bind";

// If there is a firewall between you and nameservers you want

// to talk to, you might need to uncomment the query-source

// directive below. Previous versions of BIND always asked

// questions using port 53, but BIND 8.1 and later use an unprivileged

// port by default.

// query-source address * port 53;

// If your ISP provided one or more IP addresses for stable

// nameservers, you probably want to use them as forwarders.

// Uncomment the following block, and insert the addresses replacing

// the all-0's placeholder.

// forwarders {

// 0.0.0.0;

// };

# auth-nxdomain no; # conform to RFC1035

#

#};

7) You need to restart bind service

/etc/init.d/bind9 restart

8) Now you can query your request with dig tool

dig @ 8.1.2.7.5.9.3.3.1.6.1.e164.arpa -t NAPTR

You suppose to get following answer

;; ANSWER SECTION:

8.1.2.7.5.9.3.3.1.6.1.e164.arpa. 86400 IN NAPTR 100 10 "U" "SIP+E2U" "!^.*$!sip:16133957218@example.com!" .

I hope you find it useful

Typhoon Master

How to install Debian on Sun Netra 240

How to install Debian on Sun Netra 240

Why would i need to install Debian OS on Sparc?

-Maybe you're finding Solaris OS stupid and you need better managable OS on your Sparc like Linux especially Debian distro.

This article is going to cover problems in installation of Debian 5.0.1 Sparc on Sun Netra 240 Server!

1) Obtain your Debian Sparc from offical Debian link http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/5.0.1/sparc/iso-cd/

-Y ou need to download only first CD for a basic OS installation, i suggest you to download other elements via apt-get or .deb packets after OS installation done, this will save your valuable bandwidth

2) Burn your iso image with what CD burning program you like and place it in your N240 server

-Nero, Roxio etc.

3) You need to go "ok" prompt first for boot choice

- Easiest way to do that is sending Break while server in power-cycle

4) When you get the "ok" prompt, write "boot cdrom"

-This will reboot the box and it will boot from our Debian CD

5) Debian installer will welcome you with couple of parameters, you don't need them, just pressing Enter is enough

- 2 options "expert" and "rescue" are quite useful if you know what to do but this is out of scope this article

6) Sometimes (generally after Solaris installation) SILO cannot load itself to memory and fails to start.

- If you face a problem like that, easiest way to avoid this is unplugging N240 from power source, this will reset memory allocation.

You might see following error:

>>>>> Allocated 8 Megs of memory at 0x40000000 for kernel
>>>>> Uncompressing image...
>>>>> Loaded kernel version 2.6.18
>>>>> Loading initial ramdisk (4704626 bytes at 0x1F802000 phys, 0x40C00000
>>>> virt)...
>>>>> ERROR: Last Trap: Memory Address not Aligned

7) Setup guide will ask you about which ethernet interface dou yo prefer as primary NIC

NetXtreme BCM5704 problem on Debian Sparc Sun Nerta 240 with 4 NICs

- If you choose eth0, there is a bug about that, cause of tg3 driver, you cannot connect network when installation finished. To avoid this use eth2 instead of eth0.

- If you've already selected eth0 as your primary NIC, no worries you can edit /etc/network/interfaces file just replace eth0 to eth2. After networking service restart, your network connection will work as charm.

This bugs take sometime to finish my installation, i had to google hundreds of pages to solve them. I hope you find it usefull.

Cheers

Typhoon Master

Let's get started

Greetings,

This is the first post of my new Blog site which is going to be contain my troubleshooting experiences about Linux/Unix/IP Networking/VoIP/etc.

I'd like to share my opinions, my thoughts and my researches during find a solution about my problems, cause i believe that, knowledge is more valuable if you share with others.

Cheers,

Typhoon Master