Rob Golding

My home network has been growing and growing ever since the start. At first, just little linux firewall, and it’s not done yet.

I’ve recently upgraded the my new server, adding another 4GB of RAM to bring the total to 8GB – to give me some more room for playing around. Also, I’ve decided that with all that extra memory I can upgrade to VMware Server 2.0 safely, and all seems to have gone well. Also surprisingly, the load on the machine hasn’t gone up, even with the addition of 2 new virtual machines.

The first new server is an anti-spam gateway for my Microsoft Exchange organisation, and is working flawlessly so far. Second is a Windows Server 2008 machine, which I plan to migrate the domain onto some time in the future. I plan to do some work with the brand new O/S, and see what’s what. I’m sure there will be plenty of material to keep up-to-date with, so keep checking back!

It’s arrived! The final release of VMware Server 2.0 was announced last week. Will you be upgrading?

I’m not going to make the leap just yet. I’ve just upgraded my system (see previous post), and so far it’s been up with not a single hickup since installation. I don’t expect to be ripping up all my hard work for a while yet.

One thing that is interesting my at the moment – what are people’s opinions on the new console? Personally, I think the new console is “sort of OK”. They have the right idea – being able to manage the machine from a remote location without installing client software first – afterall it is called VMware Server. This makes sense in theory, but the console is so sluggish and, in my experience so far, buggy – that it just doesn’t work yet. Starting and stopping virtual machines is slow, and the remote VM console takes a good number of seconds to launch. The interface is vastly improved from the beta that I covered in a post a long time ago, but still not perfect in my opinion.

Also, the console has its own Tomcat web server running on the host machine, which eats up a large amount of RAM. This is annoying at best, and disastrous at worst – when you need all the RAM you have for the Virtual Machines this software is supposed to be managing!

Anyway, I may install this on a test bed somewhere, but certainly not on my production system for some time. I’d love to know if I’m in the majority or the minority on this one.

I have recently upgraded my home server, shelling out on a new Core 2 Duo CPU and 4GB of RAM for the machine. Having this much RAM means that in order to use it, I had to install a 64-bit O/S. I chose Ubuntu Server 8.04 – and VMware Server to host my virtual machines. I have put together a Word Document with some notes on the issues and tips I came accros on the way, which could prove invaluable to anyone taking the same approach as me. One of the main sources for my research and tinkering ideas was a post on the VMware Community forums – http://communities.vmware.com/thread/146002 – linked to inside the Word Document.

This post

made extremely interesting and informative reading – if one can understand the material in that post, then a lot of load issues can be easily resolved– especially IOWait issues (my particular concern). My issue turned out to be a mixture of the settings above, and Postfix misbehaving.

See the word document here.

Update: Advice followed, PDF available here.

Seeing as I’m getting into virtualization more and more recently, I decided to give the new beta of VMware Server 2.0 a go. I have a virtual machine for testing purposes on my desktop machine (a Dell Dimension 9200, E6600, 2GB RAM) – so this should prove a perfect test bed for the software.

I have a particular personal interest in VMware. The server that so many of my posts have been about as of late runs VMware – it and a couple of virtual machines provide me with my email, directory, file servers and websites. Because of this, I’m quite excited about the next release of VMware – and hopefully the transition won’t be too difficult.

Starting with the interface, which is the first noticeable difference one the installation is completed – there is nothing that has been kept from version 1 – a complete overhaul. It’s now based totally in the browser – on port 8222 (8333 for https) – using its own installation of Tomcat to be precise. This brought back bad memories of managing Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 on a client’s system – but once I started using the new interface, I began to like it more and more. It’s definitely an improvement over Microsoft’s attempt, and with the browser plug-in for Virtual Machine Remote Control (VMRC), it provides all the functionality of the previous console and more; even in firefox!

I can definitely say that the performance of VMware itself has improved in the new version, although I am running it on a Vista installation. The only real reason for this noticeable change is that the previous release would hang for a number of seconds when a virtual machine was started or stopped in Vista. It feels as though this is an issue that has been addressed in the beta, and so hopefully performance overall will have had the same attention.

Just a few shots of the new UI, first we have the login screen for the web-based management interface. My desktop is joined to the domain at my house, and the only account I could use to login was the builtin domain administrator account. Strange.

Next, the summary screen which shows some info about the host machine, which will be nice on a production server as it details the RAM usage. This will be something I look forward to using on my main server Zeus:

Finally, a shot of the only VM I have on this machine. In this case the VM is stopped, and it shows the hardware configured for the machine, and the 1×2.338GHz CPU looks promising – I could assign another!

That’s all I have on this for now, but if I find any more interesting stuff I’ll be sure to post an update. If you’re interested you can grab a copy from here: http://www.vmware.com/beta/server/.