Microsoft
Keith Smith - My Blog > MicrosoftXenServer to VMware MigrationFriday, September 4, 2015 - Posted by Keith A. Smith, in Network, VMware, Xen, MicrosoftWell, it's time to put XenServer out to pasture in favor of vSphere 6.0, the coolest thing I will miss is XenCenter which can be installed on any modern Windows OS. In the Citrix world, you do not need a dedicated XenCenter server. In the VMware world you do need a dedicated vCenter server. Not that big of a deal, but something to note if any of you start comparing the products. Start with interoperability testing In the past, I have used some version of the vCenter Converter to convert VM's from some other product. I figured I would test the theory of simply exporting a VM's from xencenter in an ovf format and importing it into vcenter. That attempt failed with the following error "Could not parse the document: 'encoding specified in XML declaration is incorrect". Upon testing the same ovf export on VMware workstation and virtualbox I received the same error. Back to the old Method It would have been great to power off VM's then export them from xencenter, then import them into vCenter. With this not being possible at the time I proceed to fire up the vCenter Converter. Using the vCenter Converter I was able to convert a few of the VM's, in some of the other attempts I received errors like converter error "Host hosts.allow: ALL:LOCAL,x.x.x.x hosts.deny: ALL:ALL Another workaround for the *nix VM's is to upload the virtual disks to the datastore, and then proceed to convert them. At this point, you could create a new virtual machine and use the new created virtual for that machine. For me, this worked great, and the *nix VM's would boot successfully. In some of the other cases, I changed from hostname to IP in the vCenter Converter, and that allowed me to convert the nix VM. I also had some instants where Windows VM's wouldn't convert; they would fail and say 3% network is unreachable host key can't be retrieved or a certificate in the host's chain is based on an untrusted root converter. For the VM's that gave those errors, I installed the vCenter Converter on the VM itself and chose This local Machine at the target. As you can see, I did quite a few workarounds to keep making progress on exporting the VM's. Into to vSphere as the final destination At this point, I have all VM's exported, I proceed to upload them into a datastore in vSphere environment. After the uploads were complete, I had to convert the disks to proper vmdk's that could be used by the VM on vSphere. On the hypervisor I enable SSH, I then proceed to SSH into the hypervisor and make my way into the datastore that housed the VM's. There were quite a few sub directory's so I had to travel into each one cd /vmfs/volumes/whatever/foldername/VMName then run vmkfstools -i currentvirtualdiskname.vmdk newvirtualdiskname.vmdk I had to do that for all the virtual disks that were uploaded. Once all that was done I added the vmx files to the vCenter Inventory, from there I had to remove the original virtual disk's and attach the new virtual disk I created. In the process, I was prompted to remove and delete the old virtual disks which is nice because that way I won't have to go back and clean up the old virtual disks. I now power on one 2012R2 VM and one 2008R2 VM for testing to ensure that they boot up and function as they should. The 2008R2 boots fine however, the 2012R2 VM blows up with the BSOD. I power up another 2012R2 VM so see if this is a one-off or not, of course, the same result of a BSOD with the error of system_thread_exception_not_handled xen.sys. 
At this point I know there is something wrong with 2012R2 and Xen, I had to boot up the VM in safe mode by choosing Troubleshoot.  Click Advanced options 
Click Startup Settings. 
Click Restart Once in safe mode I run a msconfig from the search, Under the boot tab I chose base video 
I still had the Citrix/Xen related items installed on the VM's, so that had to be the culprit. 
I reboot the VM and it boots fine, at this point I uninstall all the XenServer/Citrix related items. I then restart the VM, and I was glad to see it make it to the login screen. I did have some cases where the VM did BSOD after the msconfig modification and XenServer/Citrix items were remove but upon a restart the VM does proceed to the login screen. I had to do the aforementioned procedure for every 2012R2 VM that had a BSOD system_thread_exception_not_handled xen.sys. I should note that this project took me about 3 1/2 days to complete due to the above technical complications and many other variables.
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Sign in to Microsoft Lync failed because the service is not availableMonday, July 7, 2014 - Posted by Keith A. Smith, in MicrosoftI installed Microsoft Lync for Mac, the installation seemed go well and with out error however I was welcomed with this at login "Sign in to Microsoft Lync failed because the service is not available or you may not be connected to the internet." I spent a few hours trying to get pass the error above, eventually I found that the below worked as a resolution 1. Update the lync client version on MAC to the newest version 2. Inside of terminal flush the dns using the command If you are running Mac OS X 10.5, Mac OS X 10.6, or Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, start Terminal, and then run the following command: dscacheutil -flushcache 3. Inside of connection settings and select Manual configuration and type sipdir.online.lync.com:443 for both internal and external server 4. Make sure kerberos authentication is unchecked 5. Then try to login with incorrect sign in address it will give an error stating incorrect username and password 6. Now try to sign in with correct sign in address and check if its working and it should work
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