I have spent a great deal of my spare time the last few
years learning about virtual computing and building a virtual computing lab at
home. This has become my favorite part
of the iTinker network – which I will talk about a bit more in the days ahead.
A few weeks ago my dear friend Mike asked if we could build
a virtual computer to host a Windows NT 4 server that one of his clients uses. While this is a project that’s still in
process, we recently reached a major milestone.
We took a fresh install of Windows NT 4 running on some old hardware and
turned it into a stable and very fast virtual machine. The virtual system is meaningfully faster
than the physical system. In retrospect
that’s not surprising, but it’s really good to see.
I shared the results with Vladan Seget, a
virtualization expert with a great web site and twitter feed. I’ve relied on his work for many things. Today he posted my work on his site together
with some kind words on twitter. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Before talking about this task I want to set the stage and
pay homage to my best friend.
I met Mike 40 years ago while in high school. Our high school had a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8/e. We programmed it in Basic and, on occasion, in
assembly code. While there was a
teletype device with a tape reader in the computer room, most student
programming was done on hand-marked Hollerith cards and processed in batches
each afternoon. Mike helped run that
computer. He saw my programs and commented
on the print-outs. From his comments I
could tell that he was very smart and more than a little bit of a wise-ass. My kind of guy. We met and have been close friends ever
since. That’s the start of my journey
with computers and how I met my best friend.
While Mike and I share many interests we are also polar opposites in
many ways. He has been a balancing force
in my life and helps me to keep perspective on things.
Mike is a jack of all trades. He’s a can-do guy. One of the things he does is provide all
manner of technology consulting and support to small businesses. He has patiently listened to me in recent years
drone on about linux and open source software as well as virtualization
technology. I have been convinced that
while not working with big data centers and server farms, his business and
clients could benefit from virtualization.
He agreed in concept.
Now, back to the story.
Mike explained that his client’s server runs custom software
that could not be readily ported to a newer operating system and, due to the
passing of time, even reinstalling Windows NT on fresh hardware would
be a challenge. Finding spare parts for
the computer has also become a challenge.
I pressed him to consider porting the software to a newer operating system
or even doing a clean install on new hardware.
Those approaches were simply non-starters.
Most of my virtualization work has been with virtual
machines running current operating systems and built from the ground up as
virtual machines. I had toyed around
with VMware Work Station Stand Alone converter and converted a few Windows 7
computers to virtual machines, but nothing more than that. I was game to help Mike deploy a virtualization
environment and to tackle the NT P2V challenge.
We have met with considerable success so far. The specific steps are described on Vladan’s
site. We expect to complete our work on
the production server very soon and then move on to a few other older systems –
but none as old as the NT server.
There is a lot of useful information to be found on the web
from when these specific P2V conversions were routine. Trying to accomplish the conversion today
into a current VMware environment presents some different challenges as the
tools used before are not readily available and they wouldn’t necessarily work well
with current virtualization environments.
I’m pleased with what we have done so far and hope that by
writing everything down and sharing it publicly we can make things at least a
little easier for others who choose to go down the same road. It’s proving to be a great way to learn more
about virtualization environments and also to test out some performance
monitoring tools (Cacti in particular) that I finally got up and running on one
of my virtual machines.
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