Year: 2006

VMware opens TSX 2006 to public

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Not everybody knows that VMware doens’t organize just the VMworld conference in US.
There is another very important event in EMEA every year, called Technical Solutions Exchange (TSX).

TSX is different from VMworld cause it’s reserved to VMware Certified Professionals (VCP) bringing in very technical advanced sessions. Until today.
This TSX 2006 edition, taking place in Paris on 26-27th April, will be open for every customer and VMware (non-Enterprise) Partners for the first time.

The event will take place in Dysneyland Resort (wow!) and entrance fee will cost $399 for non VMware partners.
Sessions descriptions are not available at this time.

With this move VMware could start morphing TSX in a sort of VMworld for EMEA (just like Microsoft does with TechEd).

This is a good and a bad thing at the same time: is good cause TSX becomes an aggregation event in Europe (and I feel it’s really needed), it’s bad cause VCPs chances to know new/reserved things could be reduced or nulled.

In case I’ll attend the TSX 2006 I’ll write another post, hoping to personally meet every european virtualization.info readers.

The value of VMware VMotion

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In an animated thread inside VMTN Forums just appeared a neat witness of how important and how reliable VMware VMotion is.
In my humble opinion it’s worth more than a thousand of case studies.

I quote it integrally:

My Virtual Center console shows 215 VMs provisioned, 806 VMs migrated.
I move live production servers around ALL the time via VMotion and have never had a problem.
And I work at H&R Block, and it’s tax season. Believe me, I DON’T want servers going down this time of the year.

I had a memory module show as degraded the other day. The server didn’t go down, but Insight Manager was telling me to replace it before it failed. I moved all the VMs off in the middle of day and replaced the memory, and then moved them all back.

Beautiful.

This server was hosting 18 VMs. I don’t even want to think about hard it would have been to find a common maintenance window for 18 different servers in order to take them all down at once.
I’m sure I would have had to drive 45 minutes into work at 3:00 am, replace ONE memory module, and then drive 45 minutes back home.
Instead I VMotioned 18 VMs off (2 or 3 to each of my other servers), replaced the memory module, and VMotioned 18 VMs back. While eating my lunch.

The trick is design your capacity to give yourself the ability to recover from a completely failed VMware server or in case of maintenance work like this.

VMware Challenge suggestions

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VMware launched the biggest challenge ever just 2 days ago and apparently nothing happened…
I bet people are so busy to start their projects to not have even time for blogging 🙂

I’m not going to partecipate so I’m happy to share with all virtualization.info readers some suggestions to reach the yearned prize:

1) Try to stay simple
Creating a multiporpuse all-in-one virtual appliance could be a temptating path but 25% of your vote will be influenced by this aspect.
Also you have a limit of 2GB.

A virtual appliance doing greatly a single job is much more appreciated than one doing many job in a poor way.

2) Contemplate to write a new application
Distro ultimate customization is an easy approach but won’t help you winning the challenge.
In the same way, taking an existing liveCD distribution and recreate it inside a virtual machine isn’t exactly a great effort.
Try to be original.

3) Focus on benefits of virtualization
Virtualization isn’t just having a ready-to-go self-contained server, to avoid too many packages installed on your host OS.
Virtualization is also bringing a technology where it’s not available (e.g.: a Linux/BSD/OpenSolaris feature that Windows users cannot have).

If you find something achivable only with virtualization you’re already half a winner.

4) Focus on killer technologies
The more you’ll provide something useful today the more votes you’ll receive. Pretty obvious, huh? 🙂
Today’s hot technologies are VoIP, multimedia centers, documents sharing/collaboration (not just P2P), endpoint security, internet content filtering, privacy defense.

5) Take care of size
Small is better. But if you don’t have an idea of that small could mean consider the way your virtual machine will be delivered from computer to computer.
I would use as metric the actual stardard size for USB keys.

I think that the most sold today is the 256MB. So, I woudn’t create a virtual appliance occupying more that this size (including VMware Player and documentation).

6) Consider enterprises as audience
Choose carefully your audience. VMTN community is made by a large amount of enteprises administrators, not just self-employed professionals.
A virtual appliance for an enterprise audience could bring much more benefits than expected winning the challenge.

7) Don’t forgive security
Trimming down your virtual appliance isn’t just a suggested step dictated by judging criteria. Is also a mandatory process to grant security.
Be sure to put real effort on security, mostly if you are targeting enterprises.

8) Reconsider VMware Tools role
VMware Tools provide a lot of features you could use for innovative use of virtualizaiton.
I’m thinking about drag-n-drop for example…

9) Avoid Player hacking
A lot of hacks for VMware Player appeared since its release, to add multiple network connections, to create new disks, to change virtual network interface card.
Avoid them and stay with standard features, permitting everybody to enjoy your work immediately.

10) Team with others
This work isn’t just for money. VMware will promote your work in many ways using it as indirect, viral marketing. And 3 months to do something great aren’t that much.
Evaluate to join forces to create something really unique.

11) Simplify your development lifecycle
If you are not so proficient in Linux distros customization, or simply you want to speed up ideas evaluation, evaluate the use of online service rBuilder I covered in this post.

Again, good luck to everybody!

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Open source virtualization projects

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Last time I checked SourceForge for virtualization projects was end of November 2004, founding just 3 promising works.
What changed after more than 1 year?

Existing projects

vmware-magic reached version 1.0, but I think wasn’t intedend for a broad audience, so it still hasn’t a homepage detailing the work.

Both OpenVMRC and VMware Consolidated MUI still have no software to download.

New projects

VirtualSTB
Virtual Set Top Box. That is Windows multimedia solution that uses various Linux software that is run on same machine using Virtaul Machine aproach (coLinux, Bochs, VMware, VirtualPC,etc.).

Virtualization Toolbox
A set of small tools to assist in the maintenance and tuning of computers running VMware ESX Server both online (real time) and offline (using the VMware supplied “vm-support” script output).

Kernel Emulation on Windows
Kernel Emulation on Windows allows you to run x86 Linux native binaries under MS-Windows. No recompiling is required. The goal is to be able to run your favorite distro without dual-booting or using emulation products such as Vmware, Qemu or coLinux.

The Virtual Box Project
The Virtual Box Project develops a free alternative to the virtual machine software VMWare.

VMware Player files project
We will make VMware Player (“Playable virtual machines” files, of popular operating systems such as Linux (And different distros), Solaris, BSD and other operating systems. Packages can vary from 10MB to 2GB. VMware Player (Host software) is freeware.

VMP Config
Adds some of the features from VMware Workstation which were not included in the free VMware Player. Manipulate existing virtual machine’s virtual hardware, change network preferences, etc. Coded in Java.

ESX export-machine
bash script to export virtual machines from VMware ESX.

vmx-creator
vmx-creator will be a GUI to generate virtual machine configuraiton files compatible with VMware’s freely available VMware Player.

VMacWare
Open source version of VMware for new x68 Apple Mac’s.

Tech: Automating VMware Virtual CDROM and floppy disconnection

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Gabrie van Zanten posted on VMTN Forums a Bash script for disconnecting resources-consuming virtual CDROM and floppy devices:

I found that project admins who install VM’s often forget to disconnect CD-rom or floppy drives after they have been used. And because according to the VMware docu, CD-rom and floppy drives use extra resources through the COS, I started looking for a script that could disconnect all CD-roms and floppy at night.

Through the VMware community forum I received a script from Stuart Thompson which I editted for personal use. The result is below.

Tech: Accessing a serial console on a VMware Linux virtual machine

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A VMware user posted a nice how-to involving a tool called socat on VMTN Forums:

Create the serial ports within the VM

  1. With your virtual machine stopped and using the GUI vmware console click on the “add hardware” button
  2. Add a serial port with the following parameters:
    • Connect at Power On: checked
    • Use Named Pipe
    • Output file is ./serial1
    • This end is the server
    • The other end is an application
  3. You may want to add a second serial port now

Note: At this point you have told vmware to create the file ./serial1 in the directory containing the other files for this VM. This file won’t be created until you start the VM the next time.

Start the VM

Start the VM. As soon as the VM reaches the BIOS prompt it will have created the special file ./serial1 on the VMware host machine.

Connect to the Special File

VMware calls this a “Named Pipe”, but it’s actually a Unix Domain Socket. A named pipe can be opened as a file, but a UDS cannot. Instead, I use this hackish command to get to the UDS.

socat -d -d -d /var/lib/vmware/Virtual\ Machines/vmtestcli5/serial2tcp4-listen:9988

This links the Unix Domain Socket to port 9988 on the local machine.
Using telnet open port 9988 on the vmware host machine. You will be able to communicate into and out of the serial port.

Rather than “tcp4-listen:9988” you can use “stdio” to go directly to/from a shell on the vmware host server.
Any control characters do not get passed through appropriately.

Virtualization triggers Windows Activation process

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David Berlind from his ZDNet blog writes about Microsoft Windows Activation and VMware Player problems:

…
So, I finally got around to testing the Player to see what would happen if I copied a clone from my AMD64-based Ferrari notebook to an IBM Thinkpad T42 and I was quite surprised at the results. Upon starting the virtual machine on the Thinkpad T42, Windows XP’s start-up halted about midway through and told me that that the computer’s underlying configuration had changed significantly and that I had to re-activate my copy of Windows. So, I moved forward with the activation and, upon activating, everything returned to normal and the virtual machine started working.

Cool, I thought. But what was it between the copy of VMWare Workstation on the Ferrari and the Player on the Thinkpad that was different — different enough for Windows to detect a change. I thought that VMWare’s virtual machine technology virtualized everything to the point that the operating system and applications in a VM were completely abstracted from the underlying hardware. Well, apparently not. According to VMWare group product manager Srinivas Krishnamurtiff, there are some things that are not virtualizable. One of them is the host system’s processor. Said Krishnamurtiff “there’s a processor ID that’s not virtualizable.” In other words, for the clones to truly be portable across systems, the systems may have to be relatively close (within the same family) in terms of process configuration. At the very least, they can’t be processors from a different manufacturer…

This is not just a Player issue. Every time you move a virtual machine from a physical host to another you’ll have the problem, with every virtualization software.

Also the article states that copying a clone to another computer is a license violation. It depends: Microsoft revised its licensing scheme about virtualization in October 2005, granting users to have several thousands of powered off virtual machines, until they have a license for the only one powered on.

Thanks to About-Virtualization for the news.