Posts Tagged: vmware

Articles & Reviews / General / Ubuntu / Ubuntu Planet — 2 Comments
23
Apr 10

Just a quick blog update..

I haven’t really blogged about anything in awhile so I figured I would do a quick right up on a new VPS I got running Ubuntu 9.10 on the VMware platform, in the past I’ve used a Xen based VPS from Slicehost and I’m currently using shared hosting from Fivebean. I’m particualy interested in this because myself and Matthew Helmke wrote a book on VMware awhile back and I wanted to see how the performance was compared to Xen or OpenVZ in a VPS market. So, I picked up this VPS a few days ago and it’s running Ubuntu 9.10, 25GB space and 256MB of ram for $20/bucks a month from Bluemile.

One thing I like about VMware vs. Xen or OpenVZ, is it’s almost bare metal, I can manage it like a Dedicated server without having limitations imposed like a Xen or OpenVZ.

In the next few days I’m going to migrate my blog and personal websites off shared hosting and back on to this VPS, just in time for the 10.04 upgrade next week! :)

General / Ubuntu Planet / Virtualization — 2 Comments
4
Feb 09

VMware View Open Client

VMware released the first open source virtual desktop client yesterday allowing Linux end users the ability to connect to Windows desktops managed by VMware’s View product, which previously was only available to Windows users.  Check the app out on their Google code page http://code.google.com/p/vmware-view-open-client/. I hope we start seeing more open source utilities from VMware in the near future.

Apple & OSX / Virtualization — No Comments
26
Dec 08

VMWare ESX 3.5u3 in Fusion

I’ve recently been working on a project and needed quick access to a ESX server for reference. I happen to use Macbook Pro and run VMWare’s Fusion product to manage my Ubuntu Linux and Windows desktops. I figured why not try to run ESX as well. Below are the extra variables I added to make ESX run stable inside Fusion.

Hardware: MacBook Pro 2.4ghz (code 2 duo), 4GB ram (early 2008 model)
VMWare Fusion: 2.0.1
VMWare ESX: 3.5U3

I needed to add the following variables to my .vmx file in order to successfully boot and install ESX inside Fusion. I’ve noticed some people are suggesting using 2 cpu’s instead of one however I found this caused serve slowness and ESX will run just fine with 1 CPU.

monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = TRUE
monitor_control.vt32 = TRUE
numvcpus = "1"
scsi0.virtualDev = "lsilogic"
ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"
ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
ethernet0.connectionType = "bridged"

Virtualization — 1 Comment
22
Dec 08

USB devices with VMWare ESX

I decided to do a short write up on using USB devices on your virtual machines inside of VMWare ESX. One of the challenges the company I worked faced when moving our physical servers to virtual machines was the fact some of the servers required a USB dongle for the software to run.

Unlike other VMWare desktop products such as Workstation or Fusion, ESX doesn’t allow you to utilize the ESX servers native USB ports and map them to a virtual machine.

We first tried a solution from Digi called AnywhereUSB, the product works well and is very stable and cost about $250 per unit. However, the down fall was we wanted to utilize the extra ports for other servers. At the time (and this still me be the case) the AnywhereUSB product wouldn’t allow multiple virtual machines to connect to the device and share the ports, we needed a solution that would allow separate virtual machines to connect to a dedicated port.

The second and final solution was a product from Lantronix called UBox, specifically the 4100 model and it cost around $150. It allows for 4 USB devices to be connected and each port can be specifically dedicated for a virtual machine, allowing us to connect 4 USB devices to 4 separate virtual machines without them knowing about each others devices. You can also have the operating system auto connect back to the USB device when the server is rebooted to ensure the hardware is always there by using the configuration software.

The simple configuration application will sit in the system tray of Windows. Below are a few screen-shots of the application (sorry for the nasty edits).

You’ll  notice the second image is giving us a warning about the software version we are running, it’s because it’s running on Windows 2000.

One of the cool things about these Lantronix units is that we are able to connect Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 virtual machines to the same UBox. The device comes with the Windows XP, 2003 software however the Windows 2000 software can be downloaded on the companies website.

In the end the Lantronix unit performs well, we have it setup on a private network and have had relatively few problems.