Virtualize

I was up answering emails last night well into the night and before turning in I upgraded to Vmware Fusion 3. Thought I would pro’s and con’s it here for the group: Spiffy: Runs MUCH better on Snow Leopard and utilizes 64bit fully. Memory utilization on my macpro was much better than with 2 Ran a few games (HL, Quake3, DoD) and they seem to have less graphic artifacts. I can’t think of a game I play that isn’t native or run in WINE, but a neat option. I see this as a big boom for those doing 3d modeling and the software not able to run any other way. Also supports Aero and Windows 7 flip. I usually turn these off by default, but someone must like them. VNC! I missed this feature most from Workstation on Linux. You can make a vncserver so that when you start your VM you can then hookup @ the BIOS level from another machine. Great for hosting a VM as a sudo-server I haven’t had a chance to test, but the migration tool looks to be a killer option for those moving from Windows machines. It works over a network and requires a little program install on your windows machines. I am wondering if this is based on P2V they offer for Enterprise work. I wonder how many of these little converter apps will be finding their way to corporate images :) The end result being install a little program, start the mac, and convert your whole machine to a VM with your apps and settings. Lame: ...

Just a side note for when I forget how I fixed this… When using CloneZilla you can capture server images and redeploy them unless there are hardware differences. To fix issues with hardware changes between physical server hardware and VMware here are my fix actions: Windows 2003 Enterprise Change the hard drive to IDE from SCSI. Windows will blue screen when you boot after image deployment since it cannot find the drive to boot from. You will get the error: 0x0000007b After booting windows 2003 you can then install the BusLogic or LSI SCSI drivers Red Hat Linux 5 Boot with the first CD of the install set and instead of an install, use linux rescue. Once booted chroot /mnt/sysimage Blank out the /etc/modprobe.conf mv /boot/initrd-2.6.18-20.el5.img /boot/initrd-2.6.18-20.el5.img.orig mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-20.el5.img 2.6.18-20.el5 reboot Windows XP Change the hard drive to IDE from SCSI. Windows XP in the default install does not include the two SCSI adapters VMware supports, BusLogic or LSI Logic. During the CloneZilla restore you are given a few options. The ones to select to ensure a successful MBR restore are: -t1 -j1 These settings will allow you to move your physical clonezilla images to vmware.

The Good: Bringing it up to level of workstation/fusion virtual machine compatibility? Vix if you are into the innards of virtualization. The Bad: Wow I mean where do you start? Let me walk you through my install process. I upgraded from the original vmware server to beta on an Ubuntu Gutsy box. The install process was smooth as butter and worked like a champ. I expect the smoothness because VMware is the benchmark for easy installs on Linux (only behind Google for using the Loki Installer) and has always shown that. What I never expected was the actual usage of the software. Gone is your GUI console. Hold on to that for a minute. It is gone, totally non-existstent. The GUI was replaced by a Web interface using AJAX. It all feels very Web 2.0 which is great for when I log into Digg or Facebook (Ooohh Shinny!) but this is enterprise software. What makes the web interface unbearable is the speed. Has anyone used Yahoo! Mail beta AJAX interface? It has brought this quad-processor 4GiB RAM machine to its knees. That is how the VMware Web console feels. VMware! WAKE UP! Web interfaces are great and when you make it optional like you always have with WebUI packages. Optional, it only adds to the flexibility your company has given admins and architects everywhere. I understand the reasoning, web runs everywhere and gives you a lot of options for using thin clients and PDA’s. ...