Converting Windows VMWare machines to KVM

February 24th, 2010 by Alex 4 comments »

I had to do some work on a Windows 2003 virtual server running on VMWare this week which is running on our old playground VMWare install (Server 1.0.4!) and it was sooooo slow I decided enough was enough and it was time to move it on to a sensible platform.

It actually turned out to be quite easy to convert from one platform to the other, with a bit of help from my old boss James Lidderdale.

  1. Shutdown the VMWare server and take a full backup
  2. Boot the VMWare server and uninstall VMWare tools
  3. Apply mergeide.reg registry patch to enable windows to boot on KVM virtual hardware. I’ve no idea where this came from. James had it. I’d like to credit the original author though! Rename .txt to .reg and then merge in as normal.
  4. Shutdown the VMWare server
  5. Convert the vmdk disk image to a single pre-allocated monolithic image: 
    • vmware-vdiskmanager -r Server.vmdk -t 2 /some/other/folder/Server.vmdk
  6. Copy the resulting Server-flat.vmdk image over to your KVM server
  7. Now optionally convert the disk to a qcow2 file: 
    • qemu-img convert Server-flat.vmdk -O qcow2 Server.qcow2
  8. Finally create a suitable virtual machine definition using that file as the main hard drive. If all went well you should see your VMWare machine boot inside KVM.

The first time I tried this it failed miserably. Turned out that the VMWare machine I was working with had snapshots associated with it. In my case, the disk I needed to flatten with vmware-vdiskmanager was actually Server-000001.vmdk. Once I figured that out it worked first time.

4 comments »

Posted in Computing, Linux, Open Source Schools

Why I unsubscribed Audible

January 28th, 2010 by Alex 2 comments »

Because they don’t support Android. Other than that I was a pretty happy customer.

2 comments »

Posted in Android, Books, Computing, Linux

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School Christmas Dinner Photo

December 18th, 2009 by Alex No comments »

There’s been a literally a submission for the “best school Christmas dinner” crown:

My Christmas School Dinner, Longhill High School

My Christmas School Dinner, Longhill High School

So here’s the first, and to date only entry. From me! Longhill High School by Innovate Ltd. I can honestly say it’s the best school Christmas dinner I’ve had in recent times.

Turkey roll, stuffing ball,  roast and boiled potatoes, carrots, sprouts and parsnips with gravy. Pudding was Christmas pudding and custard.

Well worth a mention were the parsnips. They were so sweet – absolutely delcious. Apparently they’re cooked in oil and honey which explains it.

If you’ve taken a pic of your Christmas Dinner, send it over along with a short review if you like and I’ll add it on!

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Posted in General, Open Source Schools

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Best School Christmas Dinner

December 13th, 2009 by Alex No comments »

At work our canteen is due to be enlarged next year as we can’t seat all the students during a lunchbreak.

So next week we’ve got a Christmas dinner marathon – with the festive meal three days on the trott – and I was wondering how these three dinners will stack up against the school dinners available nationwide.

I therefore call all school staff to forward me a photo of your school chrismas dinner. I’ll stick them up here and we can see who’s getting the best deal!

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Posted in General, Open Source Schools

Converting JVC Hard Disk Camcorder Footage

December 12th, 2009 by Alex 2 comments »

When will manufacturers learn?

JVC seem to record their footage in MOD format – which is some strange MPG variant. Very few video editors will touch that, hence the need to convert it.

Trusty ffmpeg to the rescue:

ffmpeg -i input.mod -b 9191k -aspect 16:9 -s 720×576 -acodec wmav2 output.wmv

2 comments »

Posted in Uncategorized

Linux Teacher PC Update

December 11th, 2009 by Alex No comments »

Well we’ve spent a little time on this. Seb’s been helping out and has done the majority of the work so far.

We’ve got the following working:

  • “Domain” logins (against the LDAP database)
  • CCTV Software (via Wine)
  • Themed to look like our standard XP workstations (but not to the extent that you can’t tell the difference. We’re still using the standard Gnome menus). This needs further work.
  • Promethean ActivInspire for Linux (full marks Promethean)

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Posted in Computing, Linux, Open Source Schools

lvm2 Snapshot Write Performance

December 11th, 2009 by Alex No comments »

We’re running an OpenFiler based iSCSI SAN at work and have been very pleased with both its speed and reliability, however I was copying some VM images around the other day and it seemed to me that the disk IO was a little laboured.

A quick Google for lvm2 snapshot performance brought me to an article by Dennis van Dok which prompted me to do a little testing of my own.

Here’s the raw results of the tests Dennis proposes on our system:

Without Snapshot
root@virgil:/mnt/vm# sync; time sh -c “dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/vm/test bs=1M count=1000; sync”
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 1.79423 s, 584 MB/s

real    0m9.697s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m2.530s

With Snapshot
root@virgil:/mnt/vm# rm test
root@virgil:/mnt/vm# sync; time sh -c “dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/vm/test bs=1M count=1000; sync”
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 1.67537 s, 626 MB/s

real    0m49.165s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m2.020s
root@virgil:/mnt/vm#

Now I didn’t carry that out in optimal test conditions. The filesystem is mounted over iSCSI and there’s caching and multipathing in the mix too so this is far from scientific. It’s quite possible that some real traffic from one of the VMs has skewed the result somewhat, but none the less that’s a 5x slow down on write with a snapshot compared to without.

So it’s a tricky dilema. Snapshots are so convenient yet appear to impose such a penalty. We’re going away to rethink how we “do” snapshots.

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Posted in Computing, Linux

UK Three-Strikes Law

November 28th, 2009 by Alex 1 comment »

If you’re not on to this already:

I did all three.

I can’t convey the pertainent points as well as a certiain Mr Langridge does, so here is a link to his blog post about the subject. I warn you his blog post contains strong language, but I feel it’s justified.

1 comment »

Posted in Politics

Cold Callers

November 24th, 2009 by Alex 2 comments »

It’s 14:15, I should be working, but as I’ve been interrupted twice in the last 15 minutes by <Insert Person Name> from <Insert Company I’ve never heard of> who’s been working with a number of local schools, including ones we exclusively support, I thought I’d take another 2 minutes to express my frustration here.

Five top tips for technology companies calling schools:

  1. Don’t call me. It’s invasive and likely to make me think of your company as desperate for business. Most of the companies we deal with regularly are as a result of word of mouth recommendations or me calling those companies. There is a reason for that.
  2. Don’t bend the truth. If you’re working in a local school then tell me which one but PLEASE don’t try and pretend that you’re big around here when you aren’t. You will be found out.
  3. Don’t post me something and then phone to find out if I got it. Royal Mail are very efficient when it comes to delivering your unsolicited junk to the school, and our lovely post-person is very efficient at getting it to my pigeon hole. I’m equally efficient at getting it from the pigeon hole to the recycling box.
  4. If you simply must phone, please have something interesting to say. Asking me for my 3 year requirements is not my idea of a good use of 10 minutes. We have internal reviews and Becta SRF for that thank you.
  5. Finally if I say I’m not interested in your company, and request that you don’t call again, please respect my wishes. Yes I’m looking at you IT Index/Probrand or whatever you’re called right now. Oh, and getting someone else from the same sales team to call doesn’t excuse this.

Rant over. If that saves me ONE cold call it’ll have paid for itself.

2 comments »

Posted in Computing, General

Could 2010 be the year of the Linux Desktop?!

November 20th, 2009 by Alex 6 comments »

With the release of Windows 7 and Windows XP some 8 years old now, it’s getting to the point where it’s time to make some changes on the desktop.

Without signing the school up to a Microsoft Schools Agreement, we’d be looking at approximately £45,000 to upgrade to Office 2007 and Windows 7. We’d also have to start looking at running Samba 4 at the network core to support Windows 7, or, move to Active Directory which would be an additional cost (server licensing + 2008 R2 CALs).

It seems then that this might be an opportune time to consider alternatives. The school has alot of Linux at the network core. File servers, domain controllers (LDAP + Samba + bind + dhcpd), Learning Platform, VoIP, SAN, Virtualisation Solution and more are all Linux-based and we have the expertise in the technical staff to support those systems.

From a BSF point of view I’m hoping this is a smart move too. It will significantly reduce ongoing licensing costs and is pretty hard to beat for long-term sustainability. It also makes the job of any potential managed service provider bidding on our site significantly harder since the expectation will be that the philosophy of the school should not be fundamentally changed by a switch in service provision.

My Christmas holiday project therefore will be to get an Ubuntu 9.10 box to mirror the functionality of a standard teaching workstation as far as possible. We’re pretty sure we know where the sticking points will be, but like most things, you won’t really know until you try.

Main points as I see them now:

  • Support from Leadership
  • Support from Governing Body
  • Training for Staff (and Students?)
  • Support for Windows-only software
  • Support for Legacy files (Microsoft Publisher being the worst offender)
  • MIS software officially requires Microsoft Office to run and runs on .net 2 and 3.5
  • Desktop Lockdown
  • Monitoring
  • Updating software (local apt repo?)

I’ll be posting here progress as I go along in the “Open Source Schools” category.

6 comments »

Posted in BSF, Computing, Linux, Open Source Schools