Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

linux

VMware View Open Client 4.0 Beta 1

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Just noticed that a new version of the VMware View Open Client has been released:

Latest Release: 4.0.0 Beta 1 (October 2, 2009)

VMware View Open Client version 4.0.0 Beta 1 is now available on the Downloads page.

Please see the release announcement for a summary of what’s included in this release.

Features

Some of the features included are:

The following features are NOT included in this release:

For a full list of features please refer to the README.txt file available with the distribution.

Compatibility

This release is compatible with VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) 2.0, 2.1, and VMware View Manager 3.0 and 3.1.

If I have some time on my hands I will try to make a bootable stripped Linux CD that holds this client, or maybe a USB key is a better idea…. let me think about it.

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:

[email protected]:/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:

[email protected]:/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.

Bluebear Kodiak, what’s up?

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I still receive a lot of beta invitation requests while it has been really quiet around Bluebear Kodiak over the last couple of months. (I did a (p)review a while back) I just received an email that a brand new version of the Kodiak beta is about to be released. I already received the Air file but haven’t been able to test it yet. But Matt Miller of Bluebear uploaded a demo video just which shows some of the new features and I must say it really looks slick.

If you are still looking for an invite, I received another 50 and it’s on a first come first serves base. Just click here for an invitation.

(update: the invites don’t seem to be working, I will ask Bluebear to fix it asap.)

VMware View Open Client

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I’ve been using the VMware View Open Client for a while now. One of the things that the VMware View Open Client is still lacking is USB redirection. I just received a cool workaround for this “problem” from Attila Bognár.

In short: VMware View Open Client calls rdesktop, if you add a script with the name rdesktop to your path you can add several commandline options:

  1. Create a script called /usr/local/bin/rdesktop
  2. The script needs to contain the following:
    #!/bin/bash
    /usr/bin/rdesktop -r ‘disk:media=/media’ “[email protected]”
  3. Add “/usr/local/bin/” to the PATH variable and make sure it’s inserted before the original location of the rdesktop(usually /usr/bin) binary.

The -r option adds USB redirection, but you could use any of the other rdesktop commandline options to achieve the desired functionality.

VMware vCenter on Linux Technology Preview

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One of my colleagues just noticed this new section at the VMTN Community Forums: VMware vCenter Server 2.5 on Linux: Technology Preview. You can find a PDF with a how-to here, here’s  a short outtake:

This document describes how to install a technical preview of the Linux version of VirtualCenter server. The intended audience is developers, system administrators, and managers interested in using VirtualCenter on a Linux operating system.

CAUTION   Do not use this version of VirtualCenter on Linux for production purposes. This release is for evaluation purposes only.

Keep in mind this is only the vCenter server for Linux, not the client! And also keep in mind that it’s for evaluation only, please don’t use this in a production environment! If I can download it I will give it a spin tonight!