This thread continues from a virtualization off-shoot of this thread (on Ubuntu Linux 8.04):

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1217103795/47#47

I found this surpring:


Quote:

You no longer need to power off virtual machines when you exit Workstation. You can leave virtual machines running in the background, even when Workstation is not running.

It is possible to run a VM (even multiple VMs) without VMWare running?

More questions. Under headings:

New Host Operating System Support

and

New Guest Operating System Support

it says:


Quote:

�� Ubuntu Linux 6.10 �� Ubuntu Linux 7.04

This would indicate that you cannot install VMWare to Ubuntu 8.04, nor can you run it as a VM in Windows. No?

Seems to contradict previous things we've discussed. Especially regarding the "Appliance" links .. or "appliances" not the same as VMs?

Under system requirements:


Quote:

�� 733MHz or faster CPU minimum 512MB minimum (2GB is recommended). �� At least 1GB free disk space recommended for each guest operating system and the application software used with it. If you use a default setup, the actual disk space needs are approximately the same as those for installing and running the guest operating system and applications on a physical computer. �� For installation – 200MB (Linux) or 900MB (Windows) free disk space required for basic installation. You can delete the installer afterwards to reclaim disk space.

My Linux install currently uses ~5 GB disk space.

Under host operating system, it says:


Quote:

Windows Host Operating Systems (32-Bit) �� Windows XP Home Edition, SP1, SP2 �� Windows XP Professional, SP1, SP2

Not SP3.

More interesting:


Quote:

Linux Host Operating Systems (32-Bit) Supported distributions and kernels are listed below. Workstation might not run on systems that do not meet these requirements. �� Ubuntu Linux 7.04 �� Ubuntu Linux 6.10 �� Ubuntu Linux 6.06 �� Ubuntu Linux 5.10 �� Ubuntu Linux 5.04

Note no 8.04 (not even 7.10)

Quote:

Installing VMware Workstation is usually a simple process of running a standard installation wizard. This section outlines the tasks you need to perform before starting an installation

Now we're getting somewhere.

Rad wrote on Jul 31^st, 2008 at 9:27pm:

It is possible to run a VM (even multiple VMs) without VMWare running?

With this feature of Workstation the virtualization service still runs, that just means without the interactive GUI application running (which takes the virtual display and puts it in a window for you). Without the GUI running, the VMs just tick along in the background doing their thing, which is for when you have a network service in a VM and don't need to interact with it.

[ There's a kernel driver called vmx86 installed by VMware which actually does the heavy lifting. ]


Rad wrote on Jul 31^st, 2008 at 9:44pm:

This would indicate that you cannot install VMWare to Ubuntu 8.04, nor can you run it as a VM in Windows. No?

Of course it doesn't mean either of those things.  When you've got an enormous product suite covering millions of lines of code, the complexity of testing every combination of executables and platforms and updates and service packs and processors is pretty staggering.

The job QA staff has to do is vastly harder and costs vastly more money than most people appreciate. In order to change this one statement, VMware's staff would have to completely re-test every aspect of the entire product - a process that takes a lot of money - to be absolutely certain that they could update this one statement for this one product.

Furthermore, those staff (and all the relevant test equipment) are almost certainly committed to working on finding and resolving any issues in the future products in development and that they'll be refreshing soon. Pulling them off that and spending a bunch of money re-testing existing product to deal with every minor change to a piece of third-party code isn't a good practice.

There's no problem with Ubuntu as either host or guest, and the same applies to XPSP3. In fact, those screenshots I showed earlier showed 8.04 as a guest, and I'm running XPSP3.

okay, installed vmware ws.

tried to create new vm. (top icon)

it lets me select ubuntu from the drop-down list, as vm name, but when i try to navigate, i can only see ntfs areas.

ubuntu is on ext3 partition, and i can see no way to browse/navigate there. to point vmware to ubuntu partition.

what am i missing?

When you create a VM through the wizard, you'll create an empty virtual machine ready to install the new OS into, not use an existing one. Given how little value there is in using physical partitions as a backing store instead of a file (it's only sane to do this if you have a very very specific reason) that's not the default kind of virtual disk VMware's disk wizards create for you.

What you're trying to do here is really something that only people already familiar with both the OS being virtualized and virtualization should attempt - really, the best way to go with your first VMware experience is to use an existing VM appliance or install a new OS. Basically, no-one bothers going through this process because MBR-style physical disk partitions are so ludicrously inflexible - even in the "bare-metal" virtualizers which don't run inside a host OS, the disk management you get is vastly more sophisticated that what you get from classic partitioning.

Anyway, assuming you're going to continue with this and have created a new blank VM set up for Ubuntu, what you can then do is remove the blank virtual disk that VMWare created, and add a new virtual disk instead (in the VM settings, in the hardware tab, press "Add").

Choose to add a new hard disk, choose "Use a physical disk", choose the disk (PhysicalDrive0 if you only have one), choose "use individual partitions", and then pick the partition. When you've gone through this your new virtual machine will then have a virtual hard disk which refers to that specific partition in the host physical machine.

Now, after this you start the VM, the inner Ubuntu environment will just see itself as the only thing in there (which is what you want), and it won't have access to the whole disk.

wrote on Aug 1^st, 2008 at 4:10am:

What you're trying to do here is really something that only people already familiar with both the OS being virtualized and virtualization should attempt

uh, i am familiar with neither.


wrote on Aug 1^st, 2008 at 4:10am:

the best way to go with your first VMware experience is to use an existing VM appliance

which one would you suggest (i saw a few there, which all looked similar), and how would i go about doing this?


wrote on Aug 1^st, 2008 at 4:10am:

MBR-style physical disk partitions are so ludicrously inflexible

i don't understang, but believe you anyway.


wrote on Aug 1^st, 2008 at 4:10am:

disk management you get is vastly more sophisticated that what you get from classic partitioning

ditto.


wrote on Aug 1^st, 2008 at 4:10am:

assuming you're going to continue with this and have created a new blank VM set up for Ubuntu

no, i canceled out of the wizard cuz i was unable to browsevto my ext3 partition.

Rad wrote on Aug 1^st, 2008 at 8:25am:

which one would you suggest (i saw a few there, which all looked similar), and how would i go about doing this?

Just pick any one, preferably with the VMware tools installed so you some of the ease-of-use features like drag and drop from the host OS into the VM, download it, unzip and double-click the VMX file to launch it.

Or, since you've already downloaded the Ubuntu install ISO which you used to do your physical install, just make a new blank VM in the wizard (just follow all the defaults); when you open the VM you can click on the virtual CD and point it at an .ISO file, which then VMware emulates as a physical disk inside the VM. If you then start the VM it will behave just like a real machine, by trying to boot from the virtual hard disk - which is blank - and then as that fails, it will boot from the .ISO and you can install a fresh Ubuntu into the VM.

downloading:

http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/1232

I like that it had sppt for 512 MB RAM, not 256 like another.

Rad wrote on Aug 1^st, 2008 at 5:55pm:

I like that it had sppt for 512 MB RAM, not 256 like another

Actually, that's just a setting in the VMX file, as I mentioned earlier. In Workstation there's a slider you can adjust to change that, in Player you just need to hand-edit the VMX file which is plain text (open one and take a look).

Pretty much the only thing VMWare Workstation doesn't make easy is resizing the virtual disks. Of course, it helps because there's no reason not to make every virtual disk huge, because by default these are "sparse" and the VMDK file only takes up storage in the host OS based on what is actually being used. Still, since Ghost32 can clone VMDK->VMDK and resize them for you, that's covered too.

This is even true of the bare-metal hypervisors like VMWare ESX; although these don't use plain old files to store the virtual disk contents so you can't just do a file copy to move them from machine to machine, they still do give you a lot of flexibility and control over how much virtual storage each VM has and how it maps to the physical disk.

Posting this from Ubuntu 8.04 .. inside of VMware .. inside of Windows .. inside my house. =)

Pretty cool.

My vmware-vmx.exe is running close to 100% CPU. That's not good.

Kinda weird how it says I have a wired connection, even tho my connection is wireless .. with no wire attached to the laptop.

CPU just went back to normal. That was 5 or 10 minutes at max'ed out. Think it might be disk related, cuz the disk icon was flashing green.

somehow my whole screen just turned upide down.

never had that happen before.

very wierd.

any idea how to restore?

wow. somehow my graphics properties > rotation > was set to 180-degrees.

you've never troubleshooted a problem 'til you done it upside down. =)

fixed now.

didn't even know you could do that.

Rad.Test wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2008 at 5:43pm:

CPU just went back to normal. That was 5 or 10 minutes at max'ed out. Think it might be disk related, cuz the disk icon was flashing green

If you're talking about the green HDD activity icon in the lower-right corner of VMWare workstation being busy, that'll be work that the Ubuntu system was doing, such as analysing itself against the current Ubuntu package servers for what updates are necessary since it's been asleep for a few months.

VMware always emulates a wired Ethernet adapter instead of a wireless one because those are sane; you DO NOT want a VM knowing or caring about the insanity of wireless authentication and encryption. So, instead it emulates something that behaves uniformly without any of that nonsense, and thus allows the VM to be copied around and run on any physical hardware at all. OS's for which no wireless drivers are available can still run over wireless this way.

Indeed, the outer machine doesn't have to have a network connection at all. Instead, you can ask VMware to use an imaginary local Ethernet connecting all the running virtual machines in the host, so they can see each other (and the host machine).

This is important because you don't want the VMs writing to the same physical storage, since each OS does no co-ordination of work with anything else and assumes it's in total control. Although there are solutions for this (e.g. the clustering file system created for VAX/VMS and VMWare VMFS and other things for serious business use) where the OS instances coordinate, it's not something that any low-end consumer OS's have built in directly.

So, instead of mounting the outer host's disks directly from the VM, which mean the two would fight and pretty quickly trash the filesystem, you have to share them, either using the existing network support in both OS's (i.e., SMB file sharing) or using something like VMware's "Shared folders" feature which installs a special driver into the guest OS (called HGFS, for Host/Guest File System).

wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2008 at 7:04pm:

If you're talking about the green HDD activity icon in the lower-right corner of VMWare workstation being busy, that'll be work that the Ubuntu system was doing, such as analysing itself against the current Ubuntu package servers for what updates are necessary since it's been asleep for a few months.

Yes, that's exactly what was happening. Still, 100% CPU was surprising.

Rad, if you haven’t discovered them already, there exist very active (and helpful) VMware community forums (see http://communities.vmware.com/index.jspa).

Also, for an additional $40/year, you can add “Individual Workstation License Support and Subscription” to VMware Workstation – and, that gives you access to telephone support (see http://www.vmware.com/products/ws/buy.html#c6044) as well as product upgrades.

Finally, try using Norton Ghost to restore an image to a VM!  Hopefully, you find it fun.