Saturday, June 18, 2011

And why would anyone do this?!?!

Well...I got this wonderful email message early this morning.  "Hey!  Wake up....."  At first I thought it was some sort of prank until I realized it was I that programmed this emergency alert into a server in case something extremely bad happens.  It did.

So I go to work 3 times and really don't see anything wrong.  Three times I reboot all the servers and they all come up.  Then it hits me!  DOH!

A number of years ago when I was experimenting with server virtualization I thought (usually my first mistake) 'I wonder if you can virtualize a virtualized server?'  It is like making a copy of a copy.  This reminds me of the 1996 movie "Multiplicity".  Good movie if you haven't seen it.

Anyway, I got started on my virtualization of my virtualization server.  Honestly it worked very slick.  However, the networking made me scratch my head several times.  Anyone who has worked with virtualization knows that the networking piece is generally the area that causes most problems. 

So as I am looking at the servers I see that all the virtual machines come up.  Done, right?  WRONG.  The first layer of VM's came up just fine...but none of the VM's inside the VM's came up.  UGH!

Eventually I figured out that a snapshot grew too large.  Delete the snapshot (2 hrs) and all is well again in the crazy VM world.

The short of it....Don't virtualize a virtualized world unless you really want the men (and women) in the white jackets to come take you away...HA HA!  They are coming to take me away,  HA HA, HO HO, HE HE!

Tom

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