by Duncan Epping
Duncan Epping · ·
Sanbarrow.com just posted a comparison between monolithic and split disks for VMware Workstation. Read the post for the complete comparison, but in short: split disks rule.
Personally I always use sparse split disks, just to save disk space. I’m always low on disk space and using sparse split disks saves me a lot and makes it better transportable.
Duncan Epping · ·
VMware Workstation 6.5.1 has just been released, so start your engines and download:
With this release of VMware Workstation, the following new features and support have been added:
- Japanese localization — A localized version of Workstation is now available in Japanese for Windows hosts.
Note: Technical Support services for Workstation are currently delivered in English. Japanese-speaking support engineers are available in a limited capacity during the operating hours of the local support center. For more information, see VMware local language support.- Smart card support for Linux guests — Smart cards are now experimentally supported with Linux guests.
- Unity mode on Linux guests — Although support for Unity mode on Linux guests is still experimental, repainting of application windows is much improved.
- 3-D graphics — Additional improvements have been made to improve 3-D performance on Windows XP guests.
I will be testing Unity Mode on Ubuntu tonight, so expect a couple screenshots to appear! The full release notes can be found here.
Duncan Epping · ·
I just noticed that when running a VM on VMware Workstation 6.5 and Ubuntu 8.10(but this problem probably also occurs on other non-Windows OS’es), you can’t use the arrow keys. But also ctrl-alt-ins isn’t working, which is annoying cause you would have to do it with the mouse. And no arrow keys also means that you can’t browse through your command-line history in Windows or Linux for that matter. Luckily there are two work arounds:
Thanks goes out to AlexPX and Johannes for pointing us out to this solution. There’s also a KB article on this one I just noticed.
Duncan Epping · ·
I was looking into converting the VIMA appliance from OVF to a regular VM. I wanted to run VIMA directly from VMware Workstation. For the windows version of VMware Workstation there’s a conversion tool, and Arne of ICT-Freak wrote a nice howto. (Although it’s in Dutch you will figure it out cause of the large amount of screenshots!)
But I’m using VMware Workstation 6.5 on Ubuntu and it doesn’t contain the conversion features unfortunately. But luckily a beta version of VMware Converter has just been released, 4.0. As of this version VMware Converter is also available for Linux. And you can see where I’m going… You can use VMware Converter for converting .OVF appliances to VMware Workstation:
I think it’s great that more and more tools are available for Linux!
Duncan Epping · ·
I was just rebuilding my “ESX in a box” setup. I wanted to install an iSCSI Virtual San Appliance but why should I? Your answer probably is: well because you need shared storage to do a VMotion / HA / DRS etc. Yes you are completely right I do need shared storage to have these capabilities, but there’s no need for an iSCSI VSA or NFS appliance for that matter.
A while ago Bouke G. of Jume wrote a nice blog on how to set up shared storage without a SAN appliance. In short you just create an additional disk(scsi id 1:0) on the first ESX VM. Close down VMware Workstation and edit your .vmx file. I would suggest a copy and paste of the following lines and remove the duplicate lines. (scsi1:0.filename etc)
scsi1.present = “TRUE”
scsi1.virtualDev = “lsilogic”
scsi1.sharedBus = “VIRTUAL”
scsi1:0.present = “TRUE”
scsi1:0.fileName = “D:\Virtual Machines\shared_disk.vmdk”
scsi1:0.mode = “independent-persistent”
scsi1:0.redo = “”disk.locking = “FALSE”
diskLib.dataCacheMaxSize = “0”
diskLib.dataCacheMaxReadAheadSize = “0”
diskLib.dataCacheMinReadAheadSize = “0”
diskLib.dataCachePageSize = “4096”
diskLib.maxUnsyncedWrites = “0”
Now copy the correct .vmx entries to the second ESX VM’s .vmx file and just boot them up. It’s as simple as that. Yes I know setting up iSCSI isn’t difficult but this will save you precious memory, especially when running this as a demo kit on your laptop!