VM /ETC Go Green with Virtualization. Go UGLY Green with vmetc.com.

I’ve heard VMware briefly speak about the Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) standard for the last few years. For example, it seems VMI is always a topic during one or more of the Keynote sessions at VMworld. However. I can’t recall ever hearing about VMI in the real world - that is , hearing about the progress of different operating systems integrating VMI. So, when I read the Techworld article Novell gives Suse kernel a VMware boost it made me realize that the open virtualization standard is alive and well. In fact, after a little research I discovered that popular GNU/Linux distributions now ship with VMI support enabled by default.

First of all, what is VMI? VMware has a couple of web pages on the subject. The Transparent Paravirtualization page provides a good introduction.

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The free VMware Server does not have the resource pools or shares system like ESX or ESXi. However, you can manually create priorities for your guest VMs to imitate the effects of these features. If you have a Linux host you can use the scheduler to prioritize by PID, or for any host OS, you can modify the .vmx file of each VM to set priority. In effect, both these methods create a “tug of war” design similar to the resource pool design I discussed in my post titled Designing ESX Resource Pools. The details of using both methods are discussed in this post.

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Popular open source enterprise monitoring application Zenoss has a package for monitoring VMware ESX servers. Although I have never used Zenoss personally, I have run across several customers over the years who do. Check out Zenoss.com for more info about the application and the Zenpack package for monitoring ESX hosts.

A preconfigured Zenoss installation is available to download as a virtual appliance from the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace.

Here’s some more info from the web site:

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Yellow-bricks.com posted a quick article today about successfully p2v-ing a SLES server. (Yes, I know that’s redundant but it just doesn’t sound right saying “p2v a SLES”). The post was of interest to me because I briefly attempted to do the same back in December without success.

In my experience we attempted to use the VMware Converter Cold Clone CD but got a message similar to unrecognized operating system. I do not remember the exact error message, but the VMware Converter Live CD was unusable . The customer then used Ghost to make an image of the physical server, and restored that image to a “bare-virtual-metal” VM. When booting the SLES VM the boot volume was not found, or unmountable. Since this particular VM

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Try to see it once my way
Everything Zen
Everything Zen
I don’t think so

Bush - Everything Zen

Xen, XenSource, XenServer, and Zen. What are they? Which one do I use to virtualize my servers? What is Citrix’s product and how does it compare to VMware? These are my reasons for writing this post. Frankly, I was confused. After some intense meditation I decided to figure it out. Unfortunately, Lakers coach Phil Jackson was not available to help.

Wikipedia was where I started my journey. At first I was even more confused when I landed on the Xen (disambiguation) page:

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I run the free VMware Server on 32 bit Linux at home. I have it installed on PCLinuxOS 2007 - only because it was the distribution that I had loaded at the time. Before I installed VM Server I increased the server’s memory from 1 GB to 2 GB. Up until now I was only running a couple of VMs at a time and never really had any resource contention.

Just recently I decided to build some additional VMs, and to my surprise I noticed that the server was only showing 1 GB ram, and therefore VM Server only had 1 GB ram available for hosting guests. After some research I found the following article:

Linux.com :: Got more than a gig of RAM and 32-bit Linux? Heres how to use it

“Nowadays, many machines are running with 2-4 gigabytes of RAM, and their owners are discovering a problem: When they run 32-bit GNU/Linux distributions, their extra RAM is not being used. Fortunately, correcting the problem is only a matter of installing or building a kernel with a few specific parameters enabled or disabled.

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It’s not as simple as in Windows VMs !

This guide is the combined instructions found from the guides at:

http://www.howtoforge.com/vmware_tools_on_linux

http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware/howto/fedora-7-vmware-tools-install.html

I started with a fresh install of Fedora 7. I used the LiveCD and installed it to the VM hard disk. I did not apply the 210 package updates or the security updates. (Who says Linux doesn’t have be patched as often as windows?)

Note: I was unable to get the shared folders or the fast network driver feature to work. I’ve never been able to get these features working properly, but I’ve never really needed them to. The VMtools will load without these features anyways. I assumed that the sections for fixing the vmxnet module would finally make this work, but it did not. I might have done something wrong so I kept those sections in these instructions in case someone else gets it to work.

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After installing VMware tools in a Linux VM, if X windows will not start and you get an error similar to “undefined monitor vmware”, then you need to manually modify the xorg.conf file.

Do the following:

1.      Edit the X config file

#nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

2.      Add the lines

Section “Monitor”

        Identifier   “vmware”

EndSection

3.      Restart X

      #startx 

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