December 4th, 2008 Rusty
Holy CRAP!
I tried to commit my changes to svn and was greeted by a very distressing message: “cannot delete lock, the directory is corrupt or unreadable”.
I tried a few hacks to get around it but apparently my trunk was littered with these unfortunate locks. I have no idea what this means at a low level except that either Windows or Svn(or tortoise) took a big fat dump in my directory
Google to the Rescue
As usual, Google turned up forums where people had the same issue. The only suggestion was to run chkdsk on the drive. One person reported success using a utility called “unlocker” but indicated that the program ran chkdsk. Ok, how do you do that, exactly? in VMWare?
Running Chkdsk under VMWare Fusion
Turns out its really easy. Bring up a command line and type “chkdsk /R C:”. You’ll be told the volume is currently in use and asked if you’d like to run chkdsk the next time Windows is restarted. Answer “Y” and then reboot.
During step 2 of 5, chkdsk reported 15 variations of “Deleting index entry lock in index $130 of file 38956″. That sure sounds like my problem. I hope it is because step 4 of 5 takes forever. It might be wise to use the commandline switch that tells chkdsk to do a less vigorous check of files. I didn’t so I am waiting…
Vista to XP to Server 2003
I started using Vista on this computer and finally just couldn’t take the slowness anymore. I switched to XP but soon realized that all the locked down features were getting in my way. I am now developing on Windows Server 2003 and until today, was very, very happy. Now I am waiting to Windows to do its funky chicken dance, yet again. At least Server tells me what it is doing while I am unable to get my work done. Vista wasn’t nearly so communicative. Its like having a good friend who always says that really offensive thing at the most inopportune time. 90% of the time, you are having a good time. Every now and then you’d like to kick him in the teeth.
hey, thirty minutes later and its done!
..and the verdict is: (waiting… waiting… waiting… ugh! still waiting… FIXED
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November 10th, 2008 Rusty
“A Watched Pot Never Boils,” my mother always said. Or ws that Mother Goose? Regardless, I decided to make use of my time waiting for Vista to finish its launch sequence and two minute count down.
Here’s an idea, multiple boot profiles. For instance, I’d like a dev lite boot profile. That would be just the OS and Visual Studio with a few browsers and IIS. Don’t need chat, don’t need email, don’t need network discovery or ready boost or fast search indexing or update manager or user experience reporting monitor or Office quick start or adobe quick start or adobe, for that matter, or itunes or SQL Server… I’ll bet that’d shave some time off a reboot!
Hm, sounds like my XP VMWare image is about to grow up
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November 10th, 2008 Rusty
I searched the VMWare site for a place to post this but it appears my 30 days of complimentary support have expired and they believe I should purchase the right to send them an email. ha! I’ve purchased 4 copies of VMWare Fusion, blogged about using VMWare when developing on Vista and XP using a Mac, and generally been a big proponent for the Software. I think I’ve earned my right to send an email. Furthermore, I am spending my time preparing a very solid bit of feedback (while their software messes with my day), I might as well share with the world so all can discuss and understand the need.
Hard Drive Hiccups Kill VMWare Guest
Here’s the deal… When I am working with my VM Vista, and the Hard Drive disconnects from my Mac, the VM Guest (Vista) is killed dead (as if I’d pulled the power cord on the cpu). That’s not all! VMWare then spins and sputters and is unable to close, quit or even restart. Unusual for a Mac, you cannot get the VM back online without a restart. Yeah, I said it, you have to reboot the Mac.
Please Handle Expected Failures
“Don’t unplug the hard drive,” you might say? That certainly is the logical answer, isn’t it? Well, this is the second time today that I am struggling with VMWare, trying to make it let go of whatever it is trying to do so I can start over. In both case, I lost connection to my harddrive as my phone passed the external harddrive resting on the arm of my chair. No idea why it disconnected, be it a bump or some magnetic interference, but it did, twice. Even though I make it a policy never to disconnect without first shutting down VMWare, I experience this sort of thing at least once per week. I use VMWare all day, every day, so I suppose I see more of these kinds of things then most.
Shut Down Reliably
First I’d like to see this sort of interuption dealt with. It seems reasonable to freeze the VM in memory and present a dialog that states, “your VMImage file has been disconnected, please reconnect and click OK or choose KILL to shut down and loose all unsaved information”. That seems like something that should be possible.
Second, when VMWare shuts down, I can’t get my hard drive to eject without quitting VMWare and then waiting a very long time. I assume VMWare is still saving something but tell me so! Leave a dialog up. yo
thanks
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November 5th, 2008 Rusty
As a follow-up to my post on whether to choose Vista or XP for VMWare Fusion, I thouht I’d add this.
Lunch time, er, Launch Time
I didn’t time it scientifically but I definitely noticed. I had booted my Vista VM and was frustrated by how long I had to wait. I went and got a drink, came back, walked around a bit, checked again, got the mail, fed the dog, and finally, Vista was ready to use.
Then I realized I needed to launch my XP image to check in the changes I’d not yet committed to Subversion. XP launched in about 30 seconds.
One more thing to consider if you shut down when you are done.
p.s. If you use an external drive for VMWare images, always shut down or completely suspend before shutting down the host. Nasty things happen if you don’t. Of course, on occassion, you may get Vistaed on shut down so plan ahead.
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November 5th, 2008 Rusty
I have been using VMWare Fusion on the mac for 8 months or so. Overall, I am extremely happy with the performance and capabilities is gives me. Obviously, running windows on a Mac while also using Mac native apps is a given. However, I also value the isolation it provides to my Windows installation and the flexibility it provides for managing and maintaining my Windows (virtual) machine. Each time I think I would be better off running Windows off the bare metal, all I have to do is peek my head around and watch my dev counterpart, Bill, and his Toshiba running Vista… 8 times out of 10, there’s a spinning blue disc where his mouse icon should be. 2 out of 10, he’s getting Vistaed.
VmWare Considerations
First things, first. If you are planning to run VM, you need space. Unlike a real computer that manages memory judiciously, virtual machines have to hoard it, keep in on one place, and use it in ways that physical machines do not. In return, you get the ability to copy a computer from drive to drive. You can archive an entire machine onto an external device for safe keeping. You can modify it, roll it back, branch it, etc. That’s coooooool.
Hard drive: You need hard drive space. Get as much as possible. Most people recommend using an external harddrive for your VM image. I only recently started doing this for reasons I’ll explain in a minute. I found that my MacBook Pro with a 180G 5400rpm HD was more than fast enough to give me excellent performance with just the internal harddrive. However, that is not very much space when you start adding entire computers to it.
I recently purchased a 500G external portable from Costco.com. It rocks. I purchased that to replace my 160G of the same brand. More on that shortly.
Get no less than 500G. Seriously. If you are going to use an external drive, don’t screw around. I recommend a TB. Here is a SimpleTEch, USB 2.0, bus powered, 1 Terabyte, 7200RPM drive for $150. It’s the model I have but twice the size. I needed mine in a hurry. I wish I’d gotten that instead.
Memory: Max it. Think of VMWare as a mafia henchmen who, when asked how much it cost to save your life, he replies, "how much you got?"
I have 4G in my macBook. I am reading that people have gotten 6 to work. I am probably going to upgrade soon. While I can run one VM and all my necessary tools with 4, I get a little crippled when I fire Adobe Illustrator up while my VM Vista is running. XCode? fuh-get-about it. Xcode is a pig. I can run XCode and one other app. That has nothing to do with VMWare. If you are thinking of developing an iPhone app that connects to Asp.Net, you need all the ram you can slam into that board.
XP or Vista, man, get to the point
Here’s the deal. Vista is prettier. You can hack your XP theme to look a little like Vista. The difference is subtle, but not negligible. Vista with Visual Studio on it is going to require at least 40 Gig of space just for the guts. The same thing using XP? 5 Gig. There’s the single, biggest deal maker for you to worry about.
If you are not hard drive constrained and you have a license for Vista, use Vista. You get IIS 7, no BSOD, a supported OS, up to date driver and hardware support, etc.
If you have limited hard drive space, or you rarely use the image, use XP. You’ll have the challenges of IIS 6 and I have gotten the BSOD once for no apparent reason (although that Vista theme hack could have something to do with it).
What you won’t get, as of this writing, is Vista Aero. I have been wating for that gem to come down the pipe but it must not be a VMWare priority. The only thing I really miss is that cool window rolodex thingy. I could give a rats patooty about window bar transparency.
VM Maintenance
I don’t use snapshots. At least not intentionally. I preder to copy my VM Image to a safe place when I have just cleaned it up and made it archive ready.
Here is a great post about how to shrink your VMWare fusion disk image
NOTE: the catalyst for this post was that I messed up my Vista VM following that recipe. While I ran SDelete, my disk ran out of space.
Running SDelete will require that you have free disk space larger than the disk image you are cleaning. So, if you VMWare Vista image has creeped up to 60 Gigs, and it WILL, you need more than that free.
After SDelete failed to complete and I had to force quit Fusion, I had to dig into the VMWare Image Package to delete the state file so I could launch the machine. This, fortunately, recovered the VM but it left a bunch of orphaned snapshots in the package. Now my 60G image was now 90G! Argh! I tried to deleted snapshots using the menu option in VMWare but this failed. Same issue. Deleting snapshots requires that you have enough space to double the image size. VMWare will consolidate the images by writing 1 new image that includes the result of combingin all the snapshot images, discarding chane deltas.
Running Delete Snapshots will require that you have free disk space larger than the disk image package you are cleaning.
So… all this being said. If you plan to run Vista and use it like a rented mule, you need 200 Gig dedicated to that image. Why 200?! Because you might get lazy, like me, and let your VM become bloated and then wish to clean it up. At that time, you might, like me, be sitting on a 90G iamge that could be 35 fully optimized. In order to get your space back, you need working space.
A little XP Nostalgia
While I labored though that space turmoil, I ran and enhanced my XP image. I’d started playing with it a while back but continued using Vista as it was snappy and reliable. During this whole fiasco, I couldn’t use my Vista VM so I fired up that XP image and worked with it. I’ll say that it reminded me of going from an Acura TL to a Honda Accord. They are both nice cars. The latter is stripped down a little but much more fuel efficient and definitely less expensive. The former is at the same time more powerful and less reliable (at least my TLs have been less reliable). I intentionally did not install everything I usually use on XP so that my image would remain lean and portable.
During this exercise, I discovered some things I could do to make my everyday development experience much more performant. In light of getting back to productivity, I am going to end this post with the following:
Keep you image small, install what you need, make frequent backups and get as much memory and storage as you can afford.
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July 12th, 2008 Rusty
I’m a little confused this evening as I repeat the process of shrinking my Virtual Machine. I had copied my VM’s from my internal HD to my newly formatted (Mac OS Extended (journaled)) and then defragged my 72G Vista image. I then tried to sdelete the drive to clear out unused space when I inadvertently ran out of space on the external hardrive. I had to kill VMWare. Suprisingly, the VM came back up without an issue. The image is now 97G. Not exactly what I was after. Aparently, sdelete uses a lot of temp space and it left it allocated.
I decided to repeat the process on my internal harddrive and then copy the result to the external. Yes, I’ll copy the image before I sdelete.
So that leads me to my question regarding snapshots. VMWare Fusion supports one snapshot per VM. Once you create one, you cannot shrink your disk. When you discard a snapshot, it takes for-freakin-ever for VMWare to “clean deleted files”.
Assuming you had some free space on a drive somewhere, why would you use snapshots at all rather than the very easy, fast “copy the file” and backup the whole thing. You ca have as many copies as you have space so there’s no “single snap limitation”.
If you could maintain multiple snapshots, or branched machines like in VirtualPC, then there’s a point to using them. I just don’t see the point in Fusion and wish I wasn’t waiting fr those deleted files to be cleaned up. Thought that’s what I was doing by deleting them 
Tags: VMWare
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July 12th, 2008 Rusty
Switching from Windows to Mac is a many faceted adventure. I initially formatted all my disks as Fat32 because I still use Windows quite a bit and wanted interoperability. However, I discovered that this format has a file size limit. I believe its 2G. That’s pretty small considering my virtual machines are almost all over that.
Most drives come formatted for Windows. Windows has a work around so you can work with larger files. For my purpose, I want native support for large files so I am reformatting my drive for Mac. Which format?
According to Apple Support, Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is the most reliable.
You will not be able to read this disk from Windows but you can make it available through VMWare to your Virtual Machine.
Tags: VMWare
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