vizz.info

Just noticed an interesting quirk with VMWare Server and hyper threading CPUs

I told my VM to use 1 CPU but CentOS 4 install detected the underlying hardware CPU had hyper threading so installed the SMP kernel !

Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.9-67.0.15.ELsmp #1 SMP Thu May 8 10:52:19 EDT 2008 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

as opposed to creating a VM where underlying hardware didn’t have hyper threading where CentOS 4 install just installed the basic kernel !

Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.9-67.0.15.EL #1 Thu May 8 10:39:19 EDT 2008 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Apparently there is a problem in the kernel used in Red Hat RHEL 4&5, CentOS 4&5, OEL 4&5, SUSE, Ubuntu 7 and other GNU/Linux distributions that causes EXT2 EXT3 filesystems that are residing on SANs to randomly go read-only !

However if you are using kernel 2.6.18-53.1.21+ or  2.6.22+ you should be ok !

See Red Hat

• https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2007-0014.html
• http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_85_10846.shtm
• http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_85_9610.shtm
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=213921

See VMware

• http://communities.vmware.com/message/752884
• http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice?externalId=1001778
• http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice?externalId=51306

http://VirtualAppliances.net/downloads/

VirtualAppliances.net appliances feature an upgrade to their base distribution, using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition, which will be supported by Canonical until 2013.

All of the 32 bit Appliances are using Ubuntu JeOS (Just enough Operating System) which provides a kernel optimized for virtual appliance use.

VMware OVF (Open Virtual appliance Format) images are now available for VMware ESX and ESXi in both 32 bit and 64 bit versions.

The Google App Engine JumpBox gives you a drop in place system for doing Google App Engine development that’s contained in an isolated environment within a virtual machine.

It runs exactly the same on GNU/Linux, Mac and other OS’s and gives you a development environment that lets you take advantage of great virtualization features like snapshots. It will run from a single download on Parallels Desktop, VMWare, Virtual Iron, Xen Open Source in fully virtualized mode and others.

VMware Server Version: 1.0.5 | 3/14/08 | Build: 80187 | is now available !

Release Notes

VMware Player is free-of-charge software that enables users to easily run any virtual machine on a PC. VMware Player runs virtual machines created by VMware Workstation, VMware Server, or VMware ESX Server and also supports other virtual machines disk formats.

http://communities.vmware.com/message/876393

VirtualBox (now owned by Sun) is asking for help on their forum. QEMU and its kernel module run on FreeBSD at this moment

and

people in the FreeBSD community raised a bounty (http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/2007cb.html) to have someone port VMware 6 to FreeBSD.

whichever way you look at it it seems that “official” VMWare/EMC will be the last !

If you are using CentOS 5 , Oracle Enterprise 5 or Red Hat Enterprise 5 as a VMware host or guest you can edit /etc/yum.conf and add a line

exclude=kernel*

this should prevent yum updating your kernel and thus breaking vmware services modules in vmware server and vmware services modules in vmware guest tools

also see

http://www.linuxmanpages.com/man5/yum.conf.5.php

http://linux.die.net/man/5/yum.conf

Sanbarrow has done a great job of documenting the VMX file.

My favorite tips are

• VMX VMPlayer 2 Server 2 ESX device translation
  
• VMX network settings
• VMX CD drive settings

Have a look in :

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Player\linux.iso\