Virtualisation on bytebang

How to migrate a vServer from netcup to another instance

Tue, 02 Jan 2018 14:24:14 +0100

The Problem

Well - I am a huge fan of visualization. This is the reason why several web presences (like simpledashboard.io and a few others) are running at virtual hosts at my favorite provider netcup.de

I like it to set up and customize my own web hosting solution - because then there are (except hardware limitations) nearly no other restrictions. But even with all this beauty, things tend to become complicated if your server reaches its limits - or just gets old. Then you have to upgrade to a new hosting plan with more powerful hardware.

Since I have not found any manuals how to do this I decided to write my own - here it is!

In the next few paragraphs, I will describe how I transferred my vServer from one hosting plan to another within 3 hours.

Create snapshots via commandline in ESXi 5.5

Sun, 10 Apr 2016 11:21:46 +0200

The Problem

I wanted to play around with automation of things inside my ESXi server. Automated snapshots are one of these things that can be useful if you can automate them - so I started researching how to do it. Here is the result !

The Solution

The solution is simple: esxcli is a tool which is built exactly for such a purpose. It can be accessed from within the command line of the hypervisor (so don’t forget to enable SSH to be able to log into the machine).

Attach a NFS datastore to ESXi 5.5

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 17:52:52 +0100

The Problem

Virtualization is a wonderful thing - but what if your virtualization server is running low on disk space and you have to provide additional harddisk space. The anser is simple: Conenct additional harddisks via NFS !

The Solution

As mentioned befoer - you have to ceonnect additional harddisk space to your vitualization box. In my example i am doing this with a Fujitsu CELVIN NAS Server Q902 which is basically a QNAP clone. To understand the provided screenshos you have to know that my NAS has the IP 192.168.0.13 and my both virtualization boxes have 192.168.0.2 and 192.168.0.10

Running SkyDemon under Linux with wine

Mon, 11 May 2015 21:21:13 +0200

The Problem

Last week I performed a check-flight with a flight instructor. He showed me a nice tool that helps a lot with the flight-planning. It is called SkyDemon and it works on iPad, Android, iPhone, PC and Web. After you have registered yourself for a 30 day trail version the installation you can install the software. While the installation on my android tabled worked without any issues (download from the play store and install it) the installation on my laptop was a bit tricky. The reason behind this issues was that i run Ubuntu 14.04 which is not supported by SkyDemon. Here is how to get it running:

Transfer a virtual machine between two ESXi Hosts

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 19:17:37 +0200

The Problem

Recently i had to migrate a bunch of files from one VmWare Hypervisor to another one. It turned out that there are multiple ways how to do this. The setup is as follows: 2 Computers - both of them are running VmWare ESXi vSphere Hypervisor. The are connected to the same LAN via a 1 Gigabit connenction.

Solutions

As stated before - there are multiple ways how to copy data between those two machines. In this article i am focusing on techniques that do not require thrid party software to perform this task. The following sections are describing my attempts to copy an ISO image from one Host (192.168.30.3) to another host (192.168.30.79). All of these attempts are solving the problem - but the performance is different. All tests where performed on two similar machines with no additional load on them.

Reattatch an existing VM to ESXi 5.5

Wed, 13 Aug 2014 15:53:55 +0200

The free VMware Hypervisor is able to attatch NAS drives in order to use it as storage for virtual machines. Lets assume you have a running ESXi 5.5 server and ou want to attatch existing VMs to it that are stored on a NAS that exposes a NFS share.

Step 1: Tell the ESXi that there is an additional Storage

This step is simple. Open the vSphereClient and attatch the exposed NFS share as new datastorage. This works pretty straight forward: Enter the servername, the name of the share and a local identifier.