Friday, October 10, 2008

Troubleshooting P2V Citrix box on VMware

One of the VM’s was having some performance issue and I found that it was a citrix box which has been P2Ved . It was windows 2000 box and VMware converter was still installed. Who ever done the P2V did not uninstall the converter. Normally Citrix on VMware best practices suggest that you should never P2V. I started troubleshooting this box to find out what went wrong. I thought may be HAL is corrupted because it was showing 4 PROC. I tried running command systeminfo and it throws out the error that it does not recognize the command. Of course it does will not since it was win2K box. So here is the way.
From your desktop XP/WIN2K3 run the command

c:\systeminfo /s /U
e.g. c:\systeminfo /s 192.168.1.101 /U administrator
Type the password for administrator:********

This shows that it has following network card and some one forget to remove these as a post P2V option.

NetWork Card(s): 14 NIC(s) Installed.
[01]: Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet
[02]: Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet
[03]: RAS Async Adapter
[04]: WAN Miniport (L2TP)
[05]: WAN Miniport (PPTP)
[06]: Direct Parallel
[07]: WAN Miniport (IP)
[08]: WAN Miniport (Network Monitor)
[09]: Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet
I opened my own blog for best practices for Citrix on VMware and started following all the steps

1. Uninstall the VMWare converter tool.
2. Delete all the unwanted NIC driver including vmware driver (Make a note of IP)
3. Uninstall the VMware tool.
4. Shut down the machine and then reduce the number of processor to two rather than 4 and that’s what best practices suggest.
5. Install the driver and unselect driver for memory.

Dang and now the performance of this box was excellent.

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