Migrate Physical Linux to Hyper-V

This past weekend, I had successfully moved a physical Linux box to a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.

I thought this might have been a long and very difficult process, but is wasn't with the help of Clonezilla. I will walk you through the process that I did below.

Items Needed:
Portable USB Hard Drive (I used a 1TB Drive)
CloneZilla ISO/CD

The first step in the process was to make sure that no one was using the server and then to shut the server down.

I then booted up the computer with CloneZilla and followed the on-screen instruction  under "Beginner". (I have a bootable flash with CloneZilla, if any one would like directions on how to do that, please let me know and I will post some.)

While Clonezilla was working on backing up the server, I created a Hyper-V virtual server.

Once I had an image file of the physical machine from CloneZilla, I plugged it in to the Server 2008 box.

Now, this was a tricky part for me: How do I get a Hyper-V guest to "see" a physical usb drive. This turned out to be simpler than I thought. If you go into "Disk Management" and right click on the usb drive and select "Offline", you can add it to a Hyper-V guest.

Once I added the usb drive to the guest, I booted the guest using Clonezilla ISO. From here, I followed the directions to restore the image. Once it finished, I ejected the ISO from the guest and booted the server.

Once the server finished booting, I made sure that the users could access it. The users have not noticed any difference.

I repeated this process on another server that had a raid card in it and CloneZilla had no problem with it.

How To Setup Wake On LAN With VLANs and HP ProCurve Switches

If you are in a VLAN environment where you have HP ProCurve switches and want to Wake-On-LAN or WOL packets to be forwarded to different VLANs

On the switch that is doing your routing, in my case, a ProCurve 5300 series switch, I typed the commands below.

ip directed-broadcast
ip udp-bcast-forward
vlan 2
     ip address 10.0.2.2 255.255.255.0
     ip forward-protocol udp 10.0.5.255 9
vlan 5
     ip address 10.0.5.2 255.255.255.0

VLAN 2 is where my FOG server sits and the WOL packets it sends out are forwarded to VLAN 5.

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I was recently asked to give a little more detail on this post. (I also found a typo I made and fixed it too. I changed 10.0.16.255 to 10.0.5.255)

This post assumes that you are using virtual LANs or VLANs. If you are not using VLANs, you don't have to do this.

Here is the quick and dirty of VLANs.
- VLANs take your one physical network and breaks it up into multiple logical networks. The closest example I can give is a hard drive. You can have one physical hard drive but multiple partitions.
Please keep in mind that this is an over simplification VLANs and what they can do.

On to the questions.

To expand on this example

• Lets say that the IP address of my FOG server is 10.0.2.50 and with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. 
• The server is sits in VLAN 2.
• VLAN 2 gateway address is 10.0.2.2
• VLAN 5 gateway address is 10.0.5.2
• The desktop computer that I want to image using FOG is in VLAN 5 and is setup to get an IP address from the DHCP server.
• The desktop computer is set up to boot from the network (PXE) first and has Wake-On-LAN (WOL) enabled

Wake-On-LAN (WOL) or "magic" packets send out a broadcast to wake up a computer. By design, VLANs keep any kind of broadcasts within it's own VLAN. (Back to the hard drive example, you can't save a 500mb file across two partitions of flash drives.) This prevents a user or someone else from taking down your entire network when they plug both ends of a network cable into the wall or switch, it will only take down that VLAN.

On HP switches (and I assume other manufactures as well), you can allow broadcasts to be passed on from one VLAN to another based on IP address and port number. This is where the command "ip forward-protocol udp 10.0.5.255 9" comes into play.

The WOL packet uses UDP port 9. The 10.0.5.255 is the broadcast address for VLAN 5. 

When my FOG server sends out a wake up broadcast (packet) using UDP port 9 in VLAN 2, my HP switch will forward that wake up broadcast (packet) on to VLAN 5.

I hope this clears up any confusion that you may have.

--Updated 3/18/13 9:20am

"The Windows Installer Service Could Not Be Accessed"

If you are getting the following message on a Windows XP machine:

The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed.
This can occur if you are running Windows in safe
mode, or if the Windows Installer is not correctly
installed. Contact your support personnel for assistance.

 To resolve this issue, follow these steps:

1. Log on to your computer as an administrator.
2. Click Start, and then click Run.
3. In the Open box, type cmd, and then click OK.
4. At the command prompt, type msiexec.exe /unregister, and then press ENTER.
5. Type msiexec /regserver, and then press ENTER.

If you are continuing to have problems, click on the Original Source Link below.

Original Source

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315353

New Wireless Technology

Check out this new wireless technology that I found on one of our HP ProCurve PoE switches.

Do you need a hint? Look at ports 10 and 11. There is nothing plugged into them but the switch says they are active.

Needless to say, the fault light was lit on this switch and it got replaced.