Virtualization Team

I have been reading all over the place about virtualization products. A lot of posts discuss VM ware VI3 & many others discuss Xen or HyperV, but I don’t see many talk about virtualcenter. As I have been using VM ware VI3 & vm ware Virtual server for a while now I can tell you virtualcenter is the most distinguished part of their offering. What struck me the most that vm ware started offering VirtualCenter for their free vm ware virtual server which seems a lot of people are ignoring and not even aware of. In this article I will talk about how useful is it to obtain virtualcenter for VMware server.

VMware Server has been free for a while. Go to the VMware website, download it, and install it on your Ubuntu.

Follow these instructions to install it on your x86 PC.

1. Download the VMware Server from here.

2. Download the latest patch from here.

3. Update everything to ensure that the installation goes smoothly:
a) sudo apt-get update
b) sudo apt-get upgrade
c) sudo apt-get install libx11-6 libx11-dev libxtst6 xlibs-dev xinetd wget
d) apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential
e) sudo apt-get install gcc binutils-doc cpp-doc make manpages-dev autoconf automake1.9 libtool flex bison gdb gcc-doc

4. Now decompress the VMware and patch files:
a) tar xvzf VMware-server-1.0.3-44356.tar.gz
b) tar xvzf vmware-any-any-update113.tar.gz

The other day, an old virtual machine of mine with VMware (that I sometimes used to test various configurations, cases, applications, etc.) ran out of disk space since it had only 2GB for storage! By today’s standards, 2GB of storage seems like a joke! But anyways, I had to solve this inconvenient problem or else I would lose time creating a new virtual machine and configuring the operating system from scratch according to the new specifications for virtual disks.

VMware provides a set of line-of-command utilities to support the administration of virtual machines. Among them is a utility called vmware-vdiskmanager that makes this operation much simpler. Simply run the command with the “-x” option and the desired new size for the virtual disk and…problem solved.

Since most of the guides I tried did not work so well, I made a better one, which I have personally tested.

As you may know, VmWare Server is installed only on kernels supported by the manufacturer of the software. There are two operating system types: Sidux 2008.1 and the new Ubuntu 8.04. If the installation fails, you can use a patch.

You can download the patch HERE.

To install VmWare, you must first equip the system with the necessary software installation:

apt-get install build-essential xinetd linux-headers-$(uname -r)

You can download the VmWare server (in tar.gz format) from the official website, and open and launch the installer. Once the setup is done, the following question should appear:

As Hyper-V being the biggest fuzz in the Virtualization solutions today, thanks to the Microsoft marketing forces. They can generate the biggest noise about each product they produce. As a lot of people hearing the fuzz, but did not have the chance to discover Hyper-V, I have decided I will discover it and take every one with me in a Hyper-V Tour with explanation and snapshots. This discovery trip consist of 5 parts & Intro as below:

Intro: Introduction to Microsoft Windows 2008 Hyper-V RTM & Our Discovery Trip.
Part one: Microsoft Windows 2008 Hyper-V RTM Installation
Part Two: MS Hyper-V Virtual Networks Configuration & Hyper-V Server settings.
Part Three: MS Hyper-V Virtual Machine Creation.
Part Four: MS Hyper-V Virtual Machine Settings.
Part Five: Microsoft Hyper-V Snapshots Technology. <==

IBM provides an excellent Field Guide to safeguard VMware disk files with Tivoli TSM under VMware GSX (Linux) and VMware ESX for free download.

I have this question often when talking about VMware. IS Solaris 10 available under VMware. Yes Solaris 10 (X86) is feasible under VMware, though it is not too spread yet.

(Solaris 10 X86 Running on VMware)

If you desire to Install Solaris 10 (X86) on VMware all you need is:

* VMware (Any Edition)

* 4 images of Solaris 10 (x86) CDs (Total: ~ 1.4 GB)

* ~ 4 hours time (installation)

* ~ 4GB HD space on the host system in a small installation

* Good Unix knowledge

* VMware Virtual Machine settings: 256MB RAM, virtual HD = 8GB, networking = Bridge

That all required,