VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘linux’

Last week I had a customer ask me for help with a repetitive administrative task that is extra aggravating for shops with a lot of Linux virtual machines (VMs). The customer was frustrated with the manual process of upgrading VMware Tools after kernel upgrades in their VMs. It’s a problem unique to Linux since the Windows operating system kernel does not change very frequently, but the development cycle of several Linux distributions can mean multiple kernel versions each year. After each upgrade and subsequent VM reboot the VMware tools must be re-installed so the tools are compiled correctly with the new kernel. Not exactly fun to do when you have a lot of Linux VMs.

I suggested 2 alternatives for the customer. The first is a scripted solution configured inside each Linux VM and the second is a built in feature of VirtualCenter and ESX for versions 2.0.1 and 3.0.1 or greater. I have not tested either of these solutions. My reason for writing this post is partly to explain the options, but also to get some feedback from the community. Let me know if you use or have tried either of these solutions or anything similar. If there is a better way please comment on this post! If you try one of these for your Linux virtual guests let me know what works and what doesn’t.

The following methods require that VMware tools are already installed in the Linux guests. For instructions for installing the tools check out the current VMware .pdf guide titled Basic System Administration Update 2 Release for ESX 3.5, ESXi version 3.5, VirtualCenter 2.5. if you are wondering if you should even install VMware tools in Linux guests than check out my post “Why do I need to install VMware Tools?”. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m writing this post with a smile from ear to ear. I’m happy because virtualization and Internet streaming video technologiy worked together to allow me to watch the Georgia Bulldogs season opener against Georgia Southern. I’m smiling because I watched the game inside a VirtualBox Windows XP virtual machine (VM) hosted on Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop, and I did not think it would work. Not only does it work, and I mean smooth video with minimal disruptions (I used a wireless connection too), but it worked in Seemless Mode. I’m smiling from ear to ear because the Bulldogs won 45 – 21.

The football game’s broadcast was only available via the pay per view ESPN Gameplan or on ESPN360.com. I was familiar with the Gameplan package through my cable provider but I had never used ESPN360.com to watch a game. After I learned ESPN360.com was free to use for customers with AT&T high speed (and other high speed providers) I decided to give it a try. Although the media player plug in can work with both Internet Explorer and Firefox, it still requires a Windows operating system. Since I run Ubuntu at home I decided I would give it a try with my VirtualBox XP guest.

The image in this post is a screenshot of my Ubuntu desktop and the Internet Exporer 7 window in VirtualBox Seemless mode. Read the rest of this entry »

It happens more frequently than I would ever imagine, but from time to time I find clients have not installed the VMware tools in their virtual machine’s (VM) operating system. I find it more often in Linux VMs than Windows, but I’ve discovered it for both types of guests none-the-less. Some times the tools install is overlooked or forgotten, but every once in a while I am told something like “Does Linux needed VMware tools?” or “what do the VMware tools do for me anyways?”.

Well, I do not have any unique insight or clever commentary to add, but I am providing the following cut and pastes from the VMware .pdf Basic System Administration Guide as a easy reference. At the very least this post will save me some time because I won’t have to dig this info out of the .pdf again when I am asked.

The following sections provide info on what you install when you install VMware tools as well as steps for installing the tools for both Windows and Linux VMs. The rest of this post is not my material but comes straight from the linked guide above – although not necessarily in the order it appears in the original document, however. Download and read the current version for yourself! Read the rest of this entry »

I was banging my head against my desk trying to make shared folders work in VirtualBox 1.64 on my WinXP notebook inside an Ubuntu 8.04 guest. I kept getting a “protocol error” failure.

Here’s the scenario I was working with:

• I created a Windows folder on my notebook to share to the guests – f:\shared2vms
• I added the folder to the shared folders properties of the Ubuntu VM and named it shared2vms
• I created a folder at /home/username/shared2vms to be the mount point of the VirtualBox shared folder in the Ubuntu guest

For a Linux guest in VirtualBox the command to use the shared folder is “mount -t vboxsf [shared folder name] [mount point]”

So, the command I was using

#sudo mount -t vboxsf shared2vms /home/user/shared2vms

After some creative Google -ing I luckily found this Virtualbox.org forum thread that solved the issue – Read the rest of this entry »

If you are running VMware Server on a Linux host and need to automate and schedule a process for backing up your guests then check out Two Bald Geeks’ bash script documented in the post at vmware-server VM backups. In short, the vmsbackup script systematically cycles through all VMs in a designated folder and accomplishes a full guest backup for each. To do this the script suspends the VM, copies it to another location, tars the copied file, removes any existing tars older then a specified time period, and then resumes the source VM again. Creating a Cron job for the script enables the process to be repeated on a scheduled basis.

Here’s some more information taken from the linked post on the strategy behind the script. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s good to see more and more of the various Linux distributions prepackage enhancements that benefit the operating system when running in virtual machines. This also makes life a whole lot easier for the administrator configuring the virtualized OS. Building VMs is already fast in comparison to physical servers, but having to take the time to modify config files to get a usable screen resolution can get on your nerves real quick! Anyone who has ever built a Linux VM over the past several years has most likely experienced Xorg (screen resolution) problems and knows what I am talking about.

Today, thanks to VMware making a large part of the Linux version of the VMware Tools open source, the latest distribution of Ubuntu (8.04 or Hardy Heron) includes the xserver-xorg-video-vmware package in it’s core installation. Hopefully the other popular distributions are doing the same. Frankly, I haven’t had the chance to explore CentOS, Fedora or Red Hat, but recent announcements seem to indicate that the same virtulized enhancements are taking place for those distros too.

So, what this means is that you Read the rest of this entry »

Installing VMware tools on Linux virtual machines can be challenging compared to installing the tools on Windows VMs. Unfortunately the differences of various different Linux distributions do not allow a universal point and click installer to be created. Each distribution has package dependencies that must be met, and those packages are installed by different means in their respective operating systems.

In my experience a few of the Linux operating systems will complete the tools install without pre-installing the dependencies. SUSE has been one of these distributions. It seems more and more companies are both performing P2V migrations of SUSE servers or building new VMs with the OS. This fact, in turn, means that understanding how to install VMware Tools in the SUSE OS has become a more frequently asked question. I wrote the following tutorial for a client running openSUSE. Although this was written for the open source version, use this post as an example for VMware Tools installation on SLES and other Linux distributions as well. Read the rest of this entry »