Vmware 2.0 Server Beta is now out for public consumption.

I’ve just installed it on my personal pc, I’ll need to post later on what I think about it, but I know it lacks a standard GUI  client and the new client is web-based.  More to come later!

http://vmware.com/beta/server/

-Dhashi

So lets pick up where we left off. I’m gonna digress from using Ubuntu today because I don’t have an Ubuntu .iso on hand. Instead today, I will be using a Slax distro I have handy.

So in order to start I realized that it is easier to have Virtualbox run under using sudo. So from a terminal launch Virtualbox with the following command. You will need to enter a password.

sudo VirtualBox

VirtualBox should start up like before.

Now click on New to start the OS install wizard.

Proceed by clicking Next.

Here you want to give your Guest OS a friendly name and select the type of OS it is. Note the long list of potential Guest OS’s. Click Next to continue.

Next you can set how much of your free memory you want to use on the OS. I recommend at least 512 MB if you can spare it. Keep in mind your Host OS needs at least 512 MB most likely to run fairly smooth. So if you have GB of memory installed, then I would suggest 512MB for the Guest OS using the slider bar in order to have a decent experience level.

Next we need to create to a virtual drive – this will launch a new wizard to setup the drive itself.

Click on Next to continue.

You have a choice of dynamically growing virtual drive – I find this nice if you don’t want to preallocate all the space for the drive in advance – the downside is less performance. If you set a static drive – you’ll have a better OS experience.

Now give the new virtual drive a friendly name and select how much space you want to specify for it. Click next to continue.

Click Finish to finalize the virtual drive wizard.

Now you can see your newly created drive selected – Click on Next to continue with the install.

This will give you an overview of your choices and finalizes the setup of the new Guest OS. Back on the main screen select the newly created OS in the list and click on the CD/DVD-ROM link on the right side menu.

Select the checkbox to activate your CD-ROM to be mounted in the virtual guest OS.

Click on Ok to return to the main screen and click on Start on the top menu to launch your Guest OS.

Read the message which informs you on how to jump the mouse out of the Guest OS screen (Right Ctrl button). Just click Ok to this message.

The First Run Wizard runs – continue by clicking on Next.

Select your choice of Media choice for install – I chose CD-ROM. Click Next to continue.

Click finish. Now I booted off a bootable Slax Distro of Backtrack (Penetration Testing Toolkit).

Here is Backtrack starting up and loading in the next few screens. Just for any other OS, just load and install if it was a regular OS install.

I hope this quick overview helps.

-dhashi

I almost forgot to post about Virtualbox this week. This is a great program to try out side by side with Vmware. I’ve setup Virtualbox along side my Vmware Player 2.0 on my Ubuntu Studio installation at work. Of course I won’t recommend running both at the same time, but separately I haven’t experienced any problems. During the past week – I managed to install quite a few basic installations of Vista Business edition, Windows 2008 (aka Longhorn), Ubuntu Gusty Gibbon, and Windows XP. I can’t say I like one over the other at this point, I always like to try new virtualization products when I get a chance

Enough about my experiences, Virtualbox from Innotek can be downloaded from their website. They offer an install path for just about every OS: Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Of course there is a Feisty installer for my i386. If you have Automatix – you have the option of installing the software from there as shown below. If you choose to use Automatix, it may not be the latest version you are installing.

If you chose a manual install, download the .deb installer file to your desktop and open a terminal shell and run the following command.

sudo dpkg -i Desktop/virtualbox_1.4.0-21864_Ubuntu_feisty_i386.deb

You will be prompted with the following screens – just use the Tab key to toggle between selections and Enter to confirm.

Once installed you will see that Virtualbox was added to your menu under Applications > System Tools > innotek Virtualbox

Once you launch Virtualbox – you will be greeted by the Welcome message. I will go over setting up a Virtualbox Guest OS in the next post. For now read up on the user manual from their website and if you have any questions – post them up on their forum.

Update: 6/18/07 – Here is the continuation of this post – http://dhashi.wordpress.com/2007/06/17/virtualbox-140-on-ubuntu-feisty-fawn-installing-an-os/

-dhashi

Working at a academic institution has some perks as I found out about this program that is available from Vmware. Of course there are requirements in order to qualify for the academic program, myself being a staff member and in charge of the computer learning environment, I think we can at least qualify for academic pricing for their software. I know we can definitely use it in a lab environment to virtualize our classroom servers (file & print, oracle, student web development, etc) and use it in infrastructure use to virtualize our web servers. Of course for infrastructure use we will need to pay for it at academic pricing, but it sure beats paying full price with our budget limitations. Here what you can get:

The departments at member institutions qualifying for free licenses will gain access to software through the VMware Technology Network (VMTN) Subscription . VMTN provides members access to a powerful suite of VMware products, support, upgrades and a host of technical resources. The products within the VMTN Subscription are ideal for instructional and research use within academic institutions.

Included products are:

• VMware Infrastructure
• VMware SDK
• VMware P2V Assistant
• VMware Workstation
• VMware Server

For IT and other infrastructure use, eligible institutions can access the entire suite of VMware software, at a special discounted price, through standard VMware commercial sales channels.

Vmware Academic Program Website

Microsoft also offers a full range of software on their academic program, if your interested check it out here. Last I checked it was around $500 for electronic fulfilment – thats downloading .iso files to burn instead of $800 for media that is sent to you, of course you can still download with that subscription. Licensing is by department – checkout this short list of perks:

The department receives numerous benefits as part of their membership:

• Latest set of Microsoft platforms, servers, and developer tools via regular CD shipments and a download Web site.
• License to install the software on any number of lab machines used by the department for instructional and research purposes.
• License to provide the software to students taking courses that lead to credit or a certificate within the department, so they can load the software on their personal computers for use in coursework and personal projects.
• Electronic software distribution to students through e-academy License Management Systems (ELMS).
• Four technical support incidents (varies by region) in addition to access to the managed newsgroups and the Online Concierge.
• Private newsgroups where faculty can ask technical and administrative questions, collaborate with each other, and talk with the MSDN AA team.
• Comprehensive Web site that provides resources for faculty, including;
  • Program information and news
  • Projects, tutorials, academically focused articles, and curriculum

Finally we could talk about Ubuntu and the whole range of Open source products including WordPress. I know that some schools use free wordpress accounts for interactive use of technology in various subjects. Blog sites obviously promotes free exchanges of ideas and spurs interaction amongst the younger generation epically. The nice thing about Open Source is that it is free for consumption.

-dhashi

Well after hours of waiting for my gusty-i386-desktop.iso to download I left for the weekend from work, upon my return I was quick to check to see if the download completed or not successfully. To my surprise it did and the media check passed without a hitch.

So instead of trying my hand at wreaking my new Ubuntu Studio install, I opted to try Vmware player 2.0 with it to run Gusty Gibbon. Yes, I know player might seem to be unable to create drives, but try using easyvmx.com which allows you to create virtual drives to install OSs on bypassing the player’s limitation. That will be another post to cover easyvmx.com.

I also tried using Virtualbox (can you see I was busy today) to run Gusty Gibbon, but I had some Gnome Desktop start up errors later caused issues restarting the install and froze my Virtualbox instance. After a few restarts it seemed to fix itself. I´m not sure if I trust this install, but it is an Alpha release – use at your own risk!

Well in terms of looks, Gibbon doesn’t seem all that different – Here are the Vmware shots:

A few more that look similar but they´re running in Virtualbox

There are a list of things that are new on the Ubuntu site for Gusty Gibbon. If you wanna read more about Gusty Gibbon try here!

Here’s a quick list

• Gnome 2.19.2
• Kernel 2.6.22-6.13
• Desktop & Laptop : Heat and power management issues resolved – better wi-fi and usb support.
• Virtualization : Paravirtualization support – better faster performance.
• Better Driver support.
• Better failure modes and bug reporting.
• Massive merge with Debian.
• Improved automatic codec search
• Latest X.org
• Cleaner bootup and login process.

Download the iso here.

I tried creating a screencast to place on youtube but I couldn´t get a clean video uploaded. I´ll try to post an link later in an update.

-dhashi

I was tinkering around trying to figure out a way to get vmware player 2.0 to install an OS of my choice and in googling for a solution, I stumbled upon this great little site on how to create a blank virtual using their online application. You get the option of using the site at three different levels of customization and just download the complete virtual os setting file and virtual drives premade in a small zip file. All you need to do is find a place to unzip them and off you go.

Here are some shots of the website’s creation wizard – I chose the EasyVMX option.

I’ve already used this site to setup vmware 2.0 player to run Windows Vista, Longhorn Beta 3, Fedora Core 7, CentOS 5.0 and Ubuntu Gusty Gibbon 7.10.

I’m planning on trying this out on some virtualization our department is planning on rolling out in the near future. I’m sure my supervisor will like this nice little gem taking the guess work out.
-dhashi

I recently saw that vmware released a new version of vmware player with the following new features so I opted to install VMware Player 2.0 on my Ubuntu Studio system to see how things run. Our campus is going to be switching to MS Vista soon, so I hope that a newer version of the free Vmware server that officially supports Vista with video acceleration will be out soon.

Here´s whats new! (taken from the vmware website)

Key Features in Version 2.0

VMware Player 2.0 adds the following features:

• Windows Vista support — You can use Windows Vista as a host and guest operating system.
• USB 2.0 Support (About Time!)— You can use peripherals that require high-speed performance, such as MP3 players and fast storage devices, in your virtual machines.
• Shared folders — If the virtual machine has shared folders enabled, you can use this feature to move files between the host and guest operating systems. The virtual machine must be preconfigured with shared folders enabled, and with the path specified to the designated shared folder on the host. As a security precaution, shared folders are disabled by default in VMware Player. When you open a virtual machine with shared folders in VMware Player, a notification message explains that shared folders have been disabled, and tells you how to re-enable the feature.
• Appliance view — Virtual machine appliances can now be preconfigured to display an appliance view. A virtual appliance is a fully pre-installed and pre-configured application and operating system environment that runs on any standard x86 desktop or server in a virtual machine for example, a Web server application with a browser-based console. The appliance view gives you a brief description of the type of server or appliance and provides a link that opens the browser on the guest system and connects to the correct port for the server console. If a virtual machine is configured with an appliance view, VMware Player defaults to the appliance view. You can also use the traditional console view if you prefer.
• Welcome page — The user-friendly Welcome page gives you the option of browsing to a virtual machine file, opening a recently used virtual machine, or downloading a virtual appliance from the VMTN (VMware Technology Network) Web site.
• Experimental support for Virtual SMP — You can use VMware Player to power on a virtual machine that has more than one virtual processor assigned.

Now to get Vmware Player 2.0 running on Ubuntu Studio, I installed some essential items as outlined on howtoforge.net´s how-to-guide on installing vmware on ubuntu prior to install. The nice thing is all I needed to do was just the Build environment portion – no patch required like in vmware server.

From a terminal -

sudo aptitude install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential

sudo aptitude install xinetd

You can download the player from the vmware site – make sure you download the .tar file http://www.vmware.com/download/player/

I followed the defaults for the install and it completed successfully.

Please note there are differences with the Player vs Server. The major thing is that you cannot create images.

I installed Vmware Player 2.0 on Ubuntu Studio Feisty Edition – I believe it should work just the same on a standard Ubuntu Feisty install.

-dhashi

Well as I predicted my Vmware install failed to start after the kernel updates that I downloaded and installed. Since there is a new version of VMware available now – 1.03. I decided it was time to upgrade my installation anyways – this would mean a full install.

So on my Ubuntu Feisty – there is a great tutorial that I followed from howtoforge.net that outline how to go about getting vmware to run on Ubuntu Feisty. Note the part about the patch that is required since even the latest version of Vmware Server doesn’t compile properly using the new kernel headers.

This how-to guide was a little dated so after a little looking around on the vmware forums – I came across a post with the newest source for the patch.

Just follow the tutorial on HowToForge.net and substitute the newer patch.

howtoforge.net is an excellent source for the newbie admin who wants to learn more about building out more different flavours of Linux and open source solutions.

-dhashi

Well, I was able to tackle getting my original XP workstation converted into a Vmware virtual drive and got it running inside my Ubuntu. I realized that I didn’t have sufficient memory – I ended up swapping out my 512MB to 2GB for my Dell Optiplex. Man, that made a world of difference on both sides of the house.I have to admit asides this weird drive controller detection error in my virtual Windows – it seems to be working adequately. Thumbs up for the vmware convertor – I gonna have to try using that to consolidate our servers here at work. If you are considering following a similar route – my VM’d XP is still lacking sound and true video acceleration. For straight office and network management use – its proving to be very good.

-dhashi

Well after dealing with issues here at work, it has been a drag having to shut down my ubuntu and boot into Windows throughout the day. Unfortunately I haven’t had time to figure out if the Windows management tools work in Ubuntu using a program like Wine, so I am currently in the process of installing vmware server on my feisty install and planning to use the vmware convertor to capture my Windows XP install into a virtual drive.

So here is my game plan:

1. Install VMware server on Feisty.

2. Install Vmware Convertor on my Windows XP and capture my XP install into a vmware virtual drive.

3. Repartition my dual boot setup so my ubuntu partition can accomodate my new virtual drive.

4. Import the capture vmware drive and hope for the best it worked!

This way I can simultaneously run ubuntu and windows xp without rebooting. I also need to add more physical RAM for the virtual machine…

Update: I had to borrow memory from my personal lab pc – basically swapped between the two boxes. I’m sitting happy with a 1.5GB upgrade.

I’ll let you know as things progress.

Oh – I almost forgot to show where you can get vmware – http://www.vmware.com/products/free_virtualization.html

-dhashi