VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘sles’

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 »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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 Read the rest of this entry »