Thursday, February 16, 2012

How to convert .GHO files to .VMDK

Ghost treats virtual disks as images. You can image a machine to a virtual disk (create a vmdk file instead of a .gho file), and you can restore a machine from a vmdk file. While performing any imaging operation GHO is the default file format of ghost
VMDK files cannot be opened in Ghost explorer, You can mount a VMDK file by using ghost with switch –ad=, once it is mounted can be used in all ghost operation.
You may want to use a Physical machine's Ghost image in vmdk or otherwise, you may want to use a vmdk to prepare a Physical machine .
By performing following simple commands you can convert the GHO files to VMDK and a VMDK file to GHO.
To convert from GHO to VMDK
ghost32 -clone,mode=restore,src=my.gho,dst=myimage.vmdk -batch -sure
To convert from VMDK to GHO spliiting into 100MB chunks
ghost32 -clone,mode=create,src=my.vmdk,dst=myimage.gho -batch -sure -split=100
There are some more switch available
  • vmdktype: Used for specifying the VMDK file type , which can be Sparse or Flat
  • vmdksplit: Used for splitting the VMDK image
  • vmdksize: Used in specifying the size of vmdk file
  • vmdkAdapter: Specifying the type of disk adapter for created vmdk
To create a VMDK file form machine directly
Ghost32 –clone,mode=create,src=1,dst=myimage.vmdk  -vmdk -sure
To restore VMDK image on machine directly
Ghost32 –clone,mode=restore,src=myimage.vmdk,dst=1  -vmdk -sure
For more information read the following article.

Monday, February 6, 2012

After a host power failure, vMotion fails with the error: Module is not loaded

This issue occurs because the vMotion module fails to load automatically after a power failure. To resolve this issue, you must re-enable vMotion after the host power failure.
To re-enable vMotion:
Click the host in vCenter Server and then click the Configuration tab.
Click Properties on the vSwitch where the vMotion VMkernel port group is located.
Click the vMotion port group and click Edit.
Deselect the vMotion Enabled option.
Click OK and then click Close.
Connect to the host using SSH.
Run this command to verify if the vMotion module is loaded:
vmkload_mod -l | grep migrate
If the above command does not return any values, run this command to load the module:
vmkload_mod migrate
Run this command and verify if the vMotion module is now loaded:
vmkload_mod -l | grep migrate
Run this command to restart services:
services.sh restart
Repeat Steps 1 to 3 and select the vMotion Enabled option. This enables vMotion.
Migrate virtual machines to another host.
Reboot the host.
Run this command to verify if the vMotion module loads properly:
vmkload_mod -l | grep migrate
You must see an output similar to:
# vmkload_mod -l | grep migrate
migrate                  2    252
For more info read the following article from VMware