For some reason, I don’t care why to be quite honest, my virtual server management website isn’t working now on one of my Virtual Server 2005 R2 hosts. It works if I hit the website from another page but if I am sitting at the console it doesn’t work. I get a completely non-useful message from IE even when I turn off “friendly” messages and I’ll be damned if I can pull together the strength to wade through the IIS logs to try and decode them and figure it out….
Again, this complete and utter failure doesn’t bother me a whole lot other than the fact that it makes me think about how badly this management interface sucks. Who the hell thinks to make the management of their server installed app dependent on IIS working properly? Lazy people, that’s who. Offer a web interface but give an actual interface that doesn’t rely on IIS as well in the off chance that IIS isn’t working properly or some change to IE makes it so it doesn’t want to work either…
Some bright person at MSFT, apparently named Paul took it upon himself to write a tool called VMRCPlus. I got a hold of this quite a long while ago through unnamed sources (names withheld to protect the guilty) and I have to say, it isn’t as pretty as the website, but it sure works well. It even works with IIS completely turned off, imagine that… Oh not hard for me to imagine… Hey Virtual Server Developers, how about you imagine that…
I can honestly say, without VMRCPlus, I would have ripped Virtual Server off of my machines in a heartbeat and replaced with VMware Server. Actually one of two of my machines that has VS 2005 R2 loaded on it is getting some new hard drives this week and being reloaded, guess which virtualization software is going on it? I have had such a great experience with VMWare Server on SuperFastVirtualMofo (SFVM) that I am going to load that instead of reloading VS 2005 R2. I mean I totally hate the fact that they lost the stacking capability but I have so much better luck with the interface, and to me, it just seems so much more responsive that it really isn’t a choice.
I do have to say though that I am looking forward to playing with Viridian on Longhorn. Love the idea, Server Core Windows machine running as the host… Oh yeah. I really really hope that the management interfaces don’t all come down to IIS because I wouldn’t use it then… though I have heard that isn’t the case so phew.
joe
Management through Virtual Server Administration Website is no longer required. VMRCplus is no longer a Microsoft internal only tool. I worked for a year to get it to a certain quality level and properly released.
Try it out.
It is going to be part of the Virtual Server 2005 R2 Resource Kit from Microsoft Press.
🙂