Excellent article. Thank you for sharing.
My experience: DOS 3.2 –> Win2k3, the last 10 years as a server admin at the corporate enterprise level. Beginner in Linux (very green)
My last two engagements were building large ESX farms attached to fiber and IP SANs. I now find myself doing some work for a small company and I have little budget. Thus I’ve built the following:
- Dell PowerEdge R900, 32 Gig RAM, 8x 146 Gig SAS (all RAID 10, single container) purchased through Dell Outlet for under $7K (2K cheaper than a white box and half the cost of a “new” R900)
- Ubuntu 8.04.1 64 Server (free)
- VMware server 1.0.6.9 (free)
Never heard of CentOS until this post.
Here’s my question: Within ESX I can trunk multiple ports and have my VMs run their own IPs (DHCP or static) accross this. Can I do this within VMware Server?

Please reply to my email address as I rarely visit these posting boards.
Your time and effort are greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

David

Can you please point me to an article on how to configure mainframe on vmware ?
My host operating system is windows XP Professional.

I’ve been messing around a lot with vmware server and centos 5.1 over the last few days and I have a problem… Maybe you have ideas about it.

configuration is
host: centos 5.1 64 bits on a dell 1950 (2 cpu with 2 core each)
guest: centos 5.1 64 bits smp (2 vcpu)

The bottom line is that I’m able to get the load average very high inside the guest, but the the load average on the host doesn’t go over 2… any idea why?

The real problem is that performance inside the vm are way lower than it would directly on the host… (like 10 times less work done) And this is not a memory issue.

thanks for any advice.

First, a bit of a disclaimer–I’ve never used Vmware Server on a Windows Host, only Linux ones. So YMMV.

My instant guess based on what you told me is disk latency.

But first of all, if you haven’t already–install the Vmware Server MUI on your machine, and take a look at it. You’ll probably notice that the VM’s that you’ve allocated a full 512 megs to aren’t actually using anything close to that. I very rarely see a VM actually /need/ 512M of RAM allocated. Adjust them accordingly.

Here’s the reason this is important: On Vmware (of any rendition), your single biggest performance hurdle will always be I/O wait on disk operations. But on Vmware Server, tuning your VM’s to allocate approximately the memory they’re actually using allows your Host OS use more of that RAM for disk cache, which is a good thing considering the size of the .vmdk files usually involved.

That would be my initial suggestion–see how your RAM is allocated, and free up what you can back to the Host OS. 1GB free isn’t a whole lot for both Windows and a disk cache.

Additionally, it would be helpful to know the setup on the 2900. If you haven’t already, mirror the drives and use a PERC that has built-in cache on it.

But as far as Vmware Server not being used in production, it’s hogwash. We’ve got 4 years of it under our belt at TLF–and *yet* have had it flake out. But sure, ESX is preferable of course, if you can actually afford it.

I am running VMware Server 1.04 on a Dell Poweredge 2900 box with Win2K3 R2 Standard with 4Gb ram. I have Netware 6.5 with Groupwise7 running on one VM(1Gb mem assigned, SpamTitan on another VM(512Mb), and BES server running on another VM(512Mb).

My users are complaining of latency issues or hangs when opening emails in Outlook 2003. If they use the GW client, the emails open instaneously.

The bosses called in a consultant to look at the setup. He told them the setup of NW and GW is perfect. The only issue he has is with VMware.

He said this:
1)VMware server was never meant to be put in production. He recommends going to ESX.
2)There is not enough memory on the box, that we should add 4 to 8Gb more.

Can Vmware server be put in production? It replaced the GSX product and it WAS made to run in a production environment…

As for the memory, I would have to install the 64bit version of Windows to take advantage of the extra memory…

What are your thoughts or suggestions?

Any input is greatly appreciated. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer. I spoke to 2 people at Vmware- one said yes, it could be run in production. Another said no, to go with ESX.

Thanks,
Rick

Any direction you can provide with getting solid command line instructions on installing the software would be great. I’d love to get this up and running and documented so I can do it over and over again.

One other thing I noticed is that like most Linux i’ve worked with I had problems finding a configuration tool or command like on SCO it was scoadmin or AIX I think it was smitty. Is there something like this for Linux normally?

You should be able to get it installed in a day. Granted, I do this quite a bit–but I can usually have CentOS and VWS up and running in under 30 minutes–so a day should be realistic for a novice.

Removing the GNOME desktop does indeed strip CentOS of any GUI. But, you can always install it later vi the ‘yum’ package manager:

yum groupinstall “GNOME Desktop Environment”

There are a few things to install immediately over and above the “Bare Bones” install of CentOS. Vmware-server requires them:

* yum install gcc kernel-devel xinetd libXtst-devel libXrender-devel

Also, make sure to use the rpm version of the package from Vmware. Makes your life easier!

I am curious if you think I’ll be able to get the OS and VMWare running in one day or not. I saw this article and it’s for CENTOS 5.0 which I downloaded 5.1 and I am already seeing a possible differences in commands or software compatibility.

http://rootprompt.org/article.php3?article=10910