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.

VirtualCenter in my opinion is the industry leader for managing virtual environments. VirtualCenter for vm ware server is an extension of the VirtualCenter product line for VM ware VI with new support for VMware Server. With VirtualCenter , VMware Server users access the powerful centralized management that was previously only available with ESX Server or GSX Server.

Benefits of VirtualCenter for VMware Server:

• Get full support for advanced features of VMware Server, such as the ability to create templates and virtual machines and 64-bit SMP
• Make the provisioning of new virtual machines in minutes with a centralized management
• Make the easy transition from GSX Server to VMware Server using “drag and drop” for the migration of virtual machines

Centralized Management with VirtualCenter includes the following:

• Single view of the inventory of virtual machines
• Create and set up virtual machines
• Templates and centralized repository of templates
• Detailed graphics and performance monitoring system availability
• Automated notifications and alerts by e-mail
• Integration with Active Directory and model of explicit permissions for a simple user management
• Monitor System Availability and Performance
• Automate operations through task scheduling and alerting to help improve responsiveness to business needs and prioritize actions needing the most urgent attention.

Due to all of the above benefits virtualcenter for vm ware server is almost a must. You can obtain a virtualcenter evaluation copy from here further more for virtualcenter detailed specifications and system
requirements can be find here.

If you have tried virtualcenter for vm ware server based on my recommendation or prior to it. Please leave a comment of your thought to share it with others. Thanks

Enjoy,

Virtualizedfuture

I would like to thank Codero for sponsoring this post without interacting with its original contents: [Choose efficient dedicated server for your virtualization and managed hosting needs available at Codero.com.]

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

5. Start the directory that has just been set up: cd vmware-server-distrib)
and run the installation: sudo ./vmware-install.pl

6. When you come to the section that tells you that if you continue with the installation of the selected file you will get an error, go to the folder where the patch is located and run:
cd ..
cd vmware-any-any-update113
sudo ./runme.pl

7. The installation should proceed without any problems. You will need to confirm some actions and enter the registry key, which is obtained by completing a form from this site (free).

The Art of Virtualization on Linux

VMware is a software virtualization system. A software virtual system is a program that simulates a physical system (e.g. a computer, hardware) with certain hardware features. When you run the program (simulator), you get an executing environment with similar purposes and capabilities of a physical computer (except for the pure physical access to simulated hardware), with a CPU (may be more than one), BIOS, graphics card, RAM, network card, sound system, USB, hard disk (may be more than one), etc.

Virtualization software lets you run (simulate) multiple computers (operating systems) simultaneously with the same hardware, thus allowing for greater use of resources. However, since there is an intermediate layer between the physical system and the operating system that runs on emulated hardware, the performance speed of the later is lower. In most cases, it is sufficient for use in production environments.

VMware is similar to its counterpart Virtual PC, although there are differences between the two that affect the way the software interacts with the physical system. The performance of a virtual system varies depending on the physical characteristics of the system on which you run it, and on the virtual resources (e.g. CPU, RAM) of the system.

While most VMware instructions are executed directly on the physical hardware, with Virtual PC they are translated into calls to the operating system that runs on the physical system, emulating an x86 platform.

Thank you Bazez for inspiring this article.

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.

For example:

$ Vmware-vdiskmanager -x 5GB virtual_disk.vmdk

Well, the task seemed simple, but the “virtual disk manager” (a.k.a. vmware-vdiskmanager)refused to perform this operation, signalling that you cannot perform such an operation on disks that use or have used snapshots. The message appeared as follows:

This disk is part of a snapshot chain in ‘/var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines/vm1/SO.vmx’.
The selected operation can only be executed on a disk with no snapshots.

A question came to me almost immediately: how we get rid of snapshots? A solution could be to reverse the snapshot(s), but this implies having to go back to an older state of the virtual machine. This is definitely not what you want. If the solution must maintain the current state of the virtual machine, then a simple way to solve this problem is to generate a new virtual disk from the snapshot desired.

This task is performed with the “-r” option of the vmware-vdiskmanager, which lets you convert a virtual disk to another type.

For example:

$ vmware-vdiskmanager -r origen.vmdk -t 0 destino.vmdk

Types of disks:

0: single file (expandable).
1: divides the virtual disk into 2GB pieces (expandable)
2: reserved physical space
3: similar to the Type 1 but with the physical space reserved.

In my case, I used Type 0 and it worked perfectly! No more snapshots!

The next step is to increase the size of the new virtual disk (which in this case corresponds to “destino.vmdk”).

$ vmware-vdiskmanager -x 5GB destino.vmdk

Now we have a new disk with 5GB and the only thing that remains to be done is to increase the size of the partition in the Guest Operating System so that they can make use of the space according to their needs. Problem solved!

Thanks to Marcelo Espinosa for inspiring this content.

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:

“Before running VMware Server for the first time, you need to configure it by
invoking the following command: “/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl” Do you want this
program to invoke the command for you now? [yes]”

Click NO.

Now, the installation stops and you must open the patch “any-update”, download it and then run it (./runme.pl).

Updating /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl … now patched
Updating /usr/bin/vmware … No patch needed/available
Updating /usr/bin/vmnet-bridge … No patch needed/available
Updating /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx … No patch needed/available
Updating /usr/lib/vmware/bin-debug/vmware-vmx … No patch needed/available
VMware modules in “/usr/lib/vmware/modules/source” has been updated.

At this point, the patch will ask whether to resume the VmWare setup using vmware-config.pl. Click Yes, go ahead.

Unfortunately, with this kernel, the patch “any-update”, may not be sufficient. If the setup stops, then download these two files:

vmmon and vmnet

and copy them into directory /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source, overwriting the existing ones and re-launching vmware-config.pl.

If there are still errors, open the file:

/usr/lib/vmware/lib/wrapper-gtk24.sh

and find the lines:

[code]vm_run()
{ local exitCode
Under these lines, paste the following:

# Fix for vmplayer pulling in libdbus-1.so.2 instead of .3
export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libdbus-1.so.3:$LD_PRELOAD

and then re-launch the setup. If there are still errors, type:

cp /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/
cp /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0 /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libpng12.so.0/
ldconfig

At this point, the setup VmWare MUST terminate without problems.

I have personally tested this on a Sidux i686 kernel 2.6.25. Theoretically, everything should run smoothly even on the new Ubuntu. I will get it as soon as it’s available and let you know if it works. If someone has successfully tested this, please let me know.

The ideas expressed in this article were highly inspired by Spippolazione.

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. <==

Bonus: Install SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP1 & Component Integration for Linux on Hyper-V

Part Five: Microsoft Hyper-V Snapshots Technology:

In the previous part we had covered the Virtual Machines settings in Hyper-V manager. At this part I will be covering Hyper-V snapshots. If you have not read the earlier 4 parts, I highly recommend having a look at it.

Snapshots of virtual machines is supported by Hyper-V. Snapshot is basically the ability to take a point in time image of your virtual machine so you can go back to it in case of a problem or bad change done to the virtual machine. Actually I liked the speed of Hyper-V snapshots, it take around 20 seconds for Hyper-V to take a snapshot of a 20GB virtual machine with 4GB used. That is a quick recovery plan.

Let’s look on how to work with Hyper-V snapshots. Right click the virtual machine you want to take a snapshot of and then click snapshot from the right click menu, just as showing in the below image:

If for any reason you desire to restore back to your snapshot, then all you have to do is click on you virtual machine then from the snapshot panel right click the snapshot you want to revert to and choose apply as shown in the image below:

Snapshots in Hyper-V is very simple to use, but a very powerful tool. Here we got to the end of part 5 & the end of our Hyper-V Discovery tour. You still might be interested in our Bonus Bonus: Install SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP1 & Component Integration for Linux on Hyper-V. I hope this tour was helpful & Enjoyable. Please leave your comments.

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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,

Sun Solaris 10 Booting Inside Windows Vista on Vmware Workstaion 6 Everything Working Video!

Enjoy the ride,

Virtualized1970