virtualization.info Editors

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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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.

VMware released the 4th patch for its mainstream product: VMware ESX Server.

Issues solved this time are:

• broader support for Intel Gigabit Ethernet cards
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 Update 2 guest OS support
• a couple of bugs

As usual the patch is cumulative.

You can read release notes and download it here.

A VMware user posted on VMTN Forums a workaround to avoid Glib and GdkPixbuf-CRITICAL errors when running Debian Sarge AMD64 OS inside a Workstation 5.5.1 virtual machine:

• run apt-get install ia32-libs
• get ia32-libs-gtk_7_amd64.deb (or later) from here and install it
• run GCONV_PATH=/usr/lib32/gconv vmware

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.

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.

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.

Quoting from TG Daily:

Following up on this morning’s news of six versions of Windows Vista, Microsoft’s next-generation client operating system, a Microsoft spokesperson told TG Daily this afternoon that Virtual PC Express, a feature of Microsoft’s new Enterprise and Ultimate versions, will be designed to run older editions of Windows as a subsystem.

“Virtual PC Express will be able to run any previous version of the Windows operating system,” the spokesperson wrote. “Customers who have annuity agreements with Microsoft automatically are granted a second license to install Windows as well as downgrade rights. This enables a customer to install an older version of Windows on top of Virtual PC Express without having to acquire an additional license.”…

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from the Virtual Iron official announcement:

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of data center virtualization and management software solutions, today announced that it has joined Blade.org, an industry community around IBM’s BladeCenter ecosystem.
…
Virtual Iron’s support for IBM BladeCenter, provides a flexible, high performance foundation for utility computing initiatives with integrated I/O interconnects, networking and built-in redundancy. Virtual Iron’s virtualizes all BladeCenter components, including processors, memory, storage and networking, to speed deployments and migrations, while also providing outstanding scalability. Virtual Iron’s policy-based management also makes use of health status information from BladeCenter components to allow automated actions in the event of failures.

Thanks to Thincomputing.net for the news.

Richard Garsthagen find a new hack form .vmx configuration files of VMware virtual machines:

…
So how do we get this Intel Pro 1000/MT card in our VM, well quite simple. Edit your .VMX file and make sure the Ethernet configuration has this line in it:

ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000”

…
Now aware of this change, I was of course curious if there was a performance difference between the vlance and intel pro NIC. Well I am not allowed to publish benchmark tests, but I can tell you there is. But in different scenarios I had different winners. TCP pure network the vlance was faster, UDP pure network the Intel won by far. Doing file copying (so disk and network) the intel won frequent as well…

Read the whole post at source.