Tag Archive: VMware


I installed Ubuntu Eucalyptus cloud (#UEC) on a couple of servers at home. I was naively expecting it to be similar to VMware. Oh I was wrong.

UEC is the Eucalyptus ‘cloud’ software running on Ubuntu servers. The instances would run under the KVM or Xen hypervisors. Ubuntu’s defaulted to running KVM but isn’t restricted by it.

“Eucalyptus is a software available under GPL that helps in creating and managing a private or even a publicly accessible cloud. It provides an EC2 compatible cloud computing platform and S3 compatible cloud storage platform…” Eucalyptus Beginner’s Guide

This is how a vm works in UEC:

You publish an image that you previously installed all the software you need (or you can download such an image). There can be as many instances of this image running as the hardware supports (spread across N number of backend Node Servers).

All instances are transient. As long as an image is running, it will have a physical presence.. but when it is shutdown, the instance is removed including any work performed in the instance.

“static” storage is available via a Storage Server. After you create an image but before you start it, you have the opportunity to attach storage to the instance.

Diagram courtesy of Eucalyptus Beginner’s Guide – UEC edition

While the management tools for UEC, and therefore Amazon EC2/EM, are primitive compared to VMware, it should be able to scale much higher with far less focus on which ‘virtual machine’ goes where.

Using VMware vCenter Converter and getting a SQL_CANTOPEN or similar error?  Make sure your backup (Carbonite in my case) is disabled else it may try to backup the database for the converter and lock the files from being written to.  Anyone know where VMware keeps this database?

I was able to move a VMware Server 2.0 (v7) vm to VMware ESX..  it was a *live* copy where I performed a Windows Volume Shadow copy of the vm files.  Everything worked for the most part but because the database, Sybase ASE 15.0.3, was running when the shadow copy was made, we had corruption in one database.  Restore from backup and all is good.

Now we need to get an updated license file from Sybase as the NIC mac address has changed..   You can *not* use the mac address from the VMware Server on ESX.  grr.

Twenty hours for the volume shadow copy to complete plus another 12 hours to scp the files to the esx box (esx console access is sloooow).   Keep in mind that the host VMware Server box was rebooting itself randomly so I really couldn’t leave it alone.  Then 3 hours to convert/clone the vmdk files and 2 hours to correct the database…  I’m tired.

It turned out to be an issue with allocating 3.75GB to a VM that was causing the rebooting.  Dropping it to 2 GB resolved the rebooting… who knew?  Nothing in Google and VMware Support wasn’t able to find anything on their side.

I’ve been trying to get VMware ESXi 4 on my old MSI MS-7388 motherboard for a long time. No matter what I tried, neither the SATA controller on the motherboard or the add on SATA controller would be recognized.

Install VMware ESXi 4.0 on an unsupported motherboard (SATA controller must support AHCI):

  1. make sure the SATA controller(s) is set to AHCI in the computer’s BIOS
  2. download VMware ESXi 4 iso
  3. burn the iso to either a cdrom or a USB thumb drive (512mb minimum) using unetbootin
  4. boot the computer into VMware ESXi
  5. Before you’re prompted to hit Enter to begin, hit ALT-F1 which will get you to a console screen without a prompt
  6. Type “unsupported” followed by Enter
  7. When prompted for a password, just hit Enter
  8. Type “vmkload_mod ahci” followed by Enter.  This will load in the driver for just about any AHCI compliant SATA controller
  9. Hit ALT-F2 to finish the installation

At this point VMware ESXi 4.0 will be installed but it won’t start when you reboot.  This is because VMware won’t load the AHCI driver by default.  So… we will have to tell it to load it automatically.  You will need a Linux Live CD such as Ubuntu.

  1. Boot into Linux
  2. From the desktop you will need to mount the VMware partitions.  In Ubuntu 8.04 and higher, you just need to click on the folders in the drop down menu
  3. Locate oem.tgz on the second VMware partition and overwrite it with this oem.tgz.  It includes a system.map file telling VMware to load the AHCI driver
  4. reboot and boot into VMware ESXi

You should have a fully working VMware ESXi server installed and ready for you to setup virtual machines! :)

I’ve been tasked with becoming an Oracle DBA, so I need to be able to create an VMware Server image containing 32 bit Ubuntu 8.04.1 Server JEOS and Oracle 10g. Much of the work was taken from Augusto Bott‘s Installing Oracle 11g on Ubuntu Linux 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) and Peter Cooper‘s How to Install VMware Tools on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 under VMware Fusion.

I was able to consolidate the methods to work rather well together. As soon as Ubuntu 8.10 Server JEOS (Intrepid) is released, I’ll verify the procedure on that operating system as well.

If you’re looking for instructions on how to install Oracle 11 XE on Ubuntu 8.04.1, look at Installing Oracle Database XE on Debian, Ubuntu, and Kubuntu by Todd Trichler.

Create a VMware Image with the following settings

  1. Choose 32bit Ubuntu for the OS type
  2. 1024 MBytes RAM
  3. 16GBytes disk space
  4. Ubuntu 8.04.1 (or higher) Server JEOS edition http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/serveredition/jeos
  5. Upon the os installation, create a non “oracle” id to use to administer the os.

Install the required updates and packages

$ sudo aptitude update
$ sudo aptitude safe-upgrade
$ sudo aptitude install build-essential xinetd linux-headers-`uname -r` openssh-client openssh-server unzip libaio1 gawk ksh rpm libmotif3 alien lsb-rpm libtool libxtst-dev libxtst6 libstdc++5

Add swap

$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/extraswap bs=1M count=1536
$ sudo mkswap /extraswap
$ sudo swapon /extraswap
$ sudo echo "/extraswap   none   swap   sw   0   0" >> /etc/fstab
# <em>"/sbin/swapon -s" should show the added swap space</em>
$ /sbin/swapon -s
Filename        Type    Size  Used  Priority
/dev/mapper/oracle10g-swap_1            partition 401400  92  -1
/extraswap                              file    1048568 0 -2

If VMware Server version is 2.0x or higher, install VMware tools:

$ sudo su – root
$ mount /dev/cdrom
$ cp /media/cdrom/*.gz ~
$ tar zxvf VMwareTools*.tar.gz
$ cd vmware-tools-distrib
$ ./vmware-install.pl

If VMware Server version is 1.0x, install VMware tools:

$ sudo su – root
$ mount /dev/cdrom
$ cp /media/cdrom/*.gz ~
$ aptitude install libgtk2.0-dev libproc-dev libdumbnet-dev xorg-dev wget
$ wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/open-vm-tools/open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf VMware*.gz ; sudo tar xzvf open-vm-tools*.gz ; cd open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/
$ ./configure &amp;&amp; make
$ cd modules/linux/
$ for i in *; do mv ${i} ${i}-only; tar -cf ${i}.tar ${i}-only; done
$ cd ../../..
$ mv -f open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/modules/linux/*.tar vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source/ ; cd vmware-tools-distrib/
$ sudo ./vmware-install.pl
$ sudo reboot

Append to /etc/sysctl.conf

$ sudo cat >> /etc/sysctl.conf << EOF
fs.file-max = 65535
kernel.shmall = 2097152
kernel.shmmax = 2147483648
kernel.shmmni = 4096
kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65535
net.core.rmem_default = 1048576
net.core.rmem_max = 1048576
net.core.wmem_default = 262144
net.core.wmem_max = 262144
EOF

Append to /etc/security/limits.conf

$ sudo cat >> /etc/security/limits.conf << EOF
oracle soft nproc 2047
oracle hard nproc 16383
oracle soft nofile 1023
oracle hard nofile 65535
EOF

Append to /etc/pam.d/login

$ sudo cat >> /etc/pam.d/login << EOF
session required /lib/security/pam_limits.so
session required pam_limits.so
EOF

Set up user / groups

$ sudo su – root
$ addgroup oinstall ; addgroup dba ; addgroup nobody ; usermod -g nobody nobody ;  useradd -g oinstall -G dba -p password -d /home/oracle -s /bin/bash oracle
$ passwd oracle
Password changed.
$ mkdir /home/oracle ; chown -R oracle:dba /home/oracle ; ln -s /usr/bin/awk /bin/awk ; ln -s /usr/bin/rpm /bin/rpm ; ln -s /usr/bin/basename /bin/basename ; mkdir /etc/rc.d
$ for i in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 S ; do ln -s /etc/rc$i.d /etc/rc.d/rc$i.d ; done
$ mkdir -p /dbms/oracle ; chown -R oracle:dba /dbms/oracle ;  sysctl -p
$ reboot

Retrieve Oracle 10g zip file

  1. Copy the Oracle install zip file from disc or somewhere
  2. Unzip it

Retrieve IP of the network card

$ ifconfig |grep "Bcast"

Install / Configure oracle manually verifying any requirements:

$ ssh -C -X oracle@(ipaddress)

$ cd /home//database
$ ./runInstaller -ignoreSysPrereqs

iSQL*Plus URL:

http://(ipaddress):5560/isqlplus

iSQL*Plus DBA URL:

http://(ipaddress):5560/isqlplus/dba

Enterprise Manager 10g Database Control URL:

http://(ipaddress):1158/em

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