Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Workstation

Playing around with WSX

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I wanted to test WSX, which is part of the Tech Preview of VMware Workstation for Linux. WSX allows you to see your virtual machine’s desktop in a browser window. I installed Workstation for Linux on my Ubuntu 12.04 desktop, the process is fairly straight forward. This is what I had to do to get WSX running:

  • Download Workstation bundle
  • Install Workstation
    sudo chmod 755 VMware-Workstation-Full-e.x.p-646643.x86_64.bundle
    sudo ./VMware-Workstation-Full-e.x.p-646643.x86_64.bundle
  • Open a terminal and do the following to install python 2.6
    sudo apt-get install python2.6
  • When python is installed you can run WSX Server
    /etc/init.d/vmware-wsx-server start
  • Now you can open a browser session to “localhost:8888” or “<ip-address-of-VM>:8888”
  • Login using your username/password
  • Click on “Home” and then on “Configuration”
  • Click “Add Server”
  • I added my vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1
  • Click the newly added server in the left pane
  • Enter your vCenter Server credentials and click login
  • Now you will see a list of VMs which you can access… (see screenshot below, this is what you will see in your browser window when you select a VM)

My next step was digging in to a lean install for WSX, but I should have known better… William Lam posted it around the time I started looking in to it. Thanks William :-). Again, I would recommend reading this article by the WSX developer. If you run in to any issues, you could always check /var/log/vmware/vmware-wsx-server-<pid>.log.

Workstation and Fusion Tech Previews!

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Both VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion just release tech preview versions. You can find them here:

What’s new for Workstation?

  • Installation and operation of VMware Workstation on Windows 8 and Windows Server 8
  • Installation and operation of Windows 8 consumer preview and Windows Server 8 in a virtual machine
  • Rendering and graphics correctness issues on all platforms and applications
  • Linux 3D desktop experience, particularly when using the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Beta
  • Linux 3D application graphics correctness and performance
  • Stability in real-world scenarios including suspend/resume and display and device support
  • Nested Virtualization – running ESX and even trying Hyper-V* as a guest OS
  • VNC connection performance and stability

What’s new for Fusion?

  • Installation and operation of Windows 8 previews in a virtual machine
  • Running Mac OS X (Mountain Lion) in a virtual machine
  • Rendering and graphics correctness issues on all platforms and applications
  • Linux 3D desktop experience, particularly Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and recent OpenSUSE releases, which should work out-of-the-box
  • Linux 3D application graphics correctness and performance
  • Changing boot devices in Mac OS X virtual machines
  • Performance and stability of virtual machine power operations including suspend, resume, pause and restart
  • Stability in real-world scenarios including suspend/resume and display and device plugging on the Mac

The coolest new feature though of these two releases is what is now known as “WSX” and part of Workstation. This enables you to access your virtual machine in a regular browser… What? Yes indeed, access it in a regular browser window! How cool is that?! One of the Workstation developers wrote a nice blog article about it. I suggest reading it and providing him with direct feedback on use cases etc!

If I have some time on my hands next week I will definitely install the Tech Preview on my Linux desktop and enable WSX!

The file is too big…err, no it’s not

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I run VMware Workstation at home because ESX doesn’t have drivers for my SATA controller. After a motherboard failure I had to reconstruct my software RAID, and this morning I tried to recreate a virtual disk I use for saving images of my laptop. Previously it was approximately 140Gb in size; after a rearrange the parition is 237Gb, so I will make the disk 236Gb. This is on an ext4 filesystem. So, off I go:

igibbs@host:/images$ vmware-vdiskmanager -c -t 0 -a ide -s 236GB fs1-images.vmdk
Creating disk '/images/fs1-images.vmdk'
Failed to create disk: The file is too big for the filesystem (0xc00000015).

Err, no it’s not. The maximum file size for ext3 and ext4 is 16TB, for ext4 will eventually be 1,048,576TB (or 1EB). To my knowledge, that’s not block size-dependent like VMFS is. Eventually it turned out that I could create a pre-allocated disk (-t 2) of 236GB but not a sparse disk (-t 0) of 236GB:

igibbs@host:/images$ vmware-vdiskmanager -c -t 2 -a ide -s 236GB fs1-images.vmdk
Creating disk 'fs1-images.vmdk'
Create: 0% done.

Hope this helps someone. I presume it’s caused by Workstation not recognising ext4 properly.

Running vSphere within Workstation will take up a lot of memory…

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As some of you noticed, when you install vSphere(ESX) within a VM you will need at least 2GB to get the installer started. Even when it has finished installing you can’t reduce the memory because the following error will occur:

I couldn’t find a way of  pre-adjusting the memory requirements but there’s a way to change this behavior and to downsize the memory when the installation has finished. Keep in mind this is, as far as I know, not supported… it’s only to be used to run ESX within VMware Workstation for your demo / test environment. I personally use it for running 2 ESX servers and vCenter within VMware Workstation on my 4GB laptop. (That’s what I actually use to create screenshots and prepare blog articles.)

ESX:

  1. Install vSphere(ESX) with at least 2 GB memory
  2. Login to the Service Console and type the following: 
    vi /etc/vmware/init/init.d/00.vmnix
  3. Change the following line to the desired value: 
    RequiredMemory=2064384
  4. Shutdown the virtual machine and change the VMs memory and boot it up!

Thanks Mark for the comment on ESXi:

  1. Install vSphere(ESXi) with at least 2 GB memory
  2. Login to the console via the “unsupported” method.
  3. Edit the file /etc/vmware/esx.conf and add the following line: 
    /vmkernel/minMemoryCheck = “false”
  4. Save the file and shutdown ESXi, change the memory and boot it up!

Don’t use any other editor than “vi”, there are multiple reports of nano wrecking the layout of the file which leads to an unrecoverable error during booting.