VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘vmware workstation’

I am certainly not the first to talk about the differences between VMware Workstation, VMware Server and VMware Player. However, this topic of conversation continues to come up. “Why should I buy VMware Workstation when I can download Server or Player for free?” There are some key differences between the products that you should understand before you decide which is right for you. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the advantages of a virtual infrastructure is the ability to cost effectively replicate your production systems to a secondary disaster recovery environment. Not only can you do this with virtual machines, but there are now several options available to allow physical servers to be replicated to a stand-by VM. This post will briefly cover several products and solutions and provide multiple commercial options and a free alternative. Read the rest of this entry »

So, you need to build a new VM. You don’t have a license for VMware Workstation? You don’t want to install VMware Server on your desktop? You realize the free VMware server is only supported on a few server operating systems, right? WinXP or Vista is not supported (you can make it work, but that’s another post for another time).

In my experience, the simplest solution has been to Read the rest of this entry »

This post is more of an idea then a report. If you’ve experimented with a design similar to my thoughts below please post a comment and let me know!

Have you tried to configure VMs in a MS cluster across separate ESX hosts? How about clustering a physical server with a VM? VMware’s guide can be found here. Referencing this guide I am specifically talking about “Clustering Virtual Machines Across Physical Hosts (Cluster Across Boxes)” and “Clustering Physical Machines and Virtual Machines (Standby Host)”.

Read the guide and you’ll find there are several prerequisites and restrictions. The most important ones being:

• you must use RDMs in physical mode for shared storage
• dedicate at least 2 physical nics to the VMs
• you can not use multipathing software
• you must use the LSILogic virtual SCSI adapter in your VMs
• you can only use 32 bit VMs. You can not cluster with 64 bit VMs
• iSCSI disks are not supported. NAS disks are not supported.
• you can only use 2 node clustering
• the boot disks for the VMs must be on local storage
• clustered VMs can not participate in an ESX cluster and use VMotion, DRS and HA

So how do we design a clustered VM application that can fully leverage VMotion, DRS, and HA? Read the rest of this entry »

If you have a VM running on the free VMware Server or VMware Workstation that is running out of disk space then you can use the command line tool vmware-vdiskmanager to grow the virtual disk. Then use the Gparted LiveCD to grow the existing partition to the new disk size. Here are the steps: Read the rest of this entry »