Tag Archive: VMware


Been a long time / Installing vmware tools in Ubuntu 8.04.1 JEOS Server

Filed Under: Linux, OS, VMware by Jason L Froebe — Leave a comment
September 26, 2008

I’m sorry folks, I got wrapped up in the ways of the physical world and then was sick the past few days.

Recently I tried installing vmware tools in a Ubuntu 8.04.1 JEOS Server virtual machine with no success.  After a bit of googling, I came across the Peter Cooper’s blog that outlined the procedure rather well for VMware Fusion, but it works for VMware Server and VMware Workstation just fine.  Essentially:

  • download Open VM Tools from Sourceforge
  • Mount VMware tools (Host -> VM -> Install VMware Tools), mount /dev/cdrom
  • Extract the vmware tools to /tmp
  • Extract and compile Open VM Tools (./configure)
  • Tar up the compiled open vm tools and copy to the vmware tools directory
  • Run vmware-install.pl

See Peter’s blog for step by step instructions.

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Anybody running VMware’s VMotion in production?

Filed Under: Databases, Microsoft, OS, SQL Server, VMware, Windows by Jason L Froebe — 3 Comments
August 25, 2008

Don’t know what VMware VMotion is? VMotion allows you to easily move one virtual machine to another VMware ESX host that is connected to the same storage mechanism (presumably SAN) with no downtime. Looks promising :)

Image courtesy of VMware

Image courtesy of VMware

Dell has a demonstration using Microsoft SQL Server where they move the live SQL Server from one blade to another with no outage:

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Adding a Virtual Disk Device to a VMware virtual machine (Windows 2003 Server host)

Filed Under: How To, Linux, OS, VMware, Windows by Jason L Froebe — 2 Comments
June 30, 2008

I thought it would be possible to add a virtual device file to a running virtual machine and have it show up in the virtual machine without restarting the virtual machine.  I was wrong.  The current VMware Server 1.0.6 is incapable of doing this.  What you can do is to set up the device file so all you have to do is to restart the virtual machine, minimizing downtime to a couple of minutes:

  • Create a new 20GB preallocated disk in the D:\Virtual Devices\DBA Dev 1\Disk4 directory:

D:\Virtual Machines\DBA Dev 1\Disk 4>vmware-vdiskmanager -c -a buslogic -s 20Gb -t 3 Disk4.vmdk
Using log file C:\DOCUME~1\ADMINI~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\vmware-DBH1admin\vdiskmanager.log
Creating a split preallocated disk ‘Disk4.vmdk’
Create: 100% done.
Virtual disk creation successful.

  • We need to determine which device slots are available.  Go to VM->Settings and look at the next free scsi device #
  • Associate the new virtual device file using the free scsi4 slot

D:\Virtual Machines\DBA Dev 1>vmware-cmd “D:\Virtual Machines\DBA Dev 1\Ubuntu.vmx” setconfig scsi4:1.fileName “Disk 4\Disk4.vmdk”
setconfig(scsi4:1.fileName Disk 4\Disk4.vmdk) = 1
D:\Virtual Machines\DBA Dev 1>vmware-cmd -v “D:\Virtual Machines\DBA Dev 1\Ubuntu.vmx” setconfig scsi4:1.present true
API Version: 1.01
setconfig(scsi4:1.present true) = 1

After you restart the virtual machine, the device will now show up when you run fdisk -l.

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VMware – copied the Ubuntu vm but now the networking doesn’t work?

Filed Under: Linux, OS, VMware by Jason L Froebe — Leave a comment
June 24, 2008

You’ve probably seen it, you copied an Ubuntu Linux virtual machine under VMware and tried starting it up with a new VMware UUID and the networking doesn’t work.  When you use a new VMware UUID, it will change the mac address on any virtual network device you have configured in the virtual machine.

A very simple ‘fix’:

In /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rule, delete the entry for your network device(s) so the new mac address is recognized on reboot.  It will look something like so:

# PCI device 0×1022:0×2000 (pcnet32)
SUBSYSTEM==”net”, ACTION==”add”, DRIVERS==”?*”, ATTR{address}==”00:0c:29:aa:4c:75″, ATTR{type}==”1″, KERNEL==”eth*”, NAME=”eth0″

Your network devices will now be working.  Don’t forget to reboot your virtual machine.

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ubuntu server 7.10 as a vmware guest on an ubuntu 8.04 host, requires ‘clock=pit’

Filed Under: Linux, OS, VMware by Jason L Froebe — Leave a comment
May 21, 2008

In order to avoid a drifting time clock in “ubuntu server 7.10″ vmware guest machine on an ubuntu 8.04 host, you need to do a few things:

  • /etc/vmware/config
  • host.cpukHz = 2000000  <– replace # with speed of your cpu (2GHz listed here)
  • host.noTSC = TRUE
  • ptsc.noTSC = TRUE
  • ‘clock=pit’ added to the kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst
  • tools.syncTime = “TRUE” in the (vmware_guest).vmx file
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