Comments on: Virtualization Short Take #2

By: slowe

slowe — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:46:34 +0000

Rich and Brian,

I appreciate the clarification and correction. I’ve updated the article accordingly. Thanks for reading!

By: Rich

Rich — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:32:12 +0000

Scott,

to quote the Rocket, you “mis-remembered” the automount defaults. Automount is enabled in Windows 2003 Standard and disabled in Enterprise.

By: Brian Mitchell

Brian Mitchell — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 05:23:19 +0000

Scott: You are correct, sir!

The MountMgr service under Enterprise 2008 (as well as 2003) has a key for “NoAuoMount” (which is set to 1 by default, thus disabling automount).

See below:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MountMgr]
“NoAutoMount”=dword:00000001

Be aware that in 2008′s Virtual Disk Services (VDS) layer, there’s also a bunch of new code for API calls assoc’d w/ the VDS SAN policy (fairly close ties to this “NoAutoMount” registry key).

Anyhow…I recall this was established as the default setting (for Enterprise & Data Center editions) to prevent it from aggressively mounting volumes from SAN arrays, as well as a security measure for removable devices (USB thumb drives and such).

-Brian (http://www.NTAPgeek.com/)

By: slowe

slowe — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:35:46 +0000

Thanks, Chris! I look forward to the additional information.

By: Christofer Hoff

Christofer Hoff — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:49:23 +0000

Scott:

I pinged Catbird’s CTO and he’s responded to my questions; I’ll post them shortly.

You may have more questions after that

/Hoff

By: slowe

slowe — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:38:58 +0000

Duncan,

Let me know what happens with those DL380′s; I’d be curious to know.

I’m glad to hear that finding the Storage VMotion issue wasn’t bad luck. Is there an RSS feed or anything similar for the VMware KB? How do you go about checking for new material?

By: Duncan

Duncan — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:24:18 +0000

I haven’t seen this happening with HP ILO Virtual Devices… But will be at a customer tomorrow who has brand new HP DL380′s and will see what happens if and when I enable this option.

And the Storage VMotion wasn’t bad luck, I just noticed the article in the Knowledge Base. I try to check it every once in a while to see if there is any handy new info there. Saves me time when troubleshooting and there’s some nice info there.