In case anyone was wondering, you can run the VI client inside Parallels Desktop on a Mac. As I plan to switch to VMware Fusion if I get Snow Leopard for my birthday I hope it works in that too. I’d really like to virtualize my Windows box.
Ew, assuming I can get the USB pass through to work in ESXi. I need to be able to use the scanner in my VM.
So a few months ago I started thinking about virtualization and the future of my profession (System Administration). So much of the hassle we have involves software compatibility issues with libraries and the code that runs on it.
My thoughts were that is would be much easier if, instead of big OSes with lots of services running on it, we had a micro-distribution running just a single application. A DNS or Mail server could be shipped as a virtual appliance with some form of hooks for shared storage via NFS or MySQL for its configuration information.
Welp, the folks monitoring the chip in my head took that idea and created JeOS (pronounced Juice). Just Enough OS is the term for my micro-distribution. And trolling though Ubuntu’s site today I discovered they’ve got a JeOS version.
With the accelerated nature of the Virtualization Project I’ve got going at work I’m not gonna propose JeOS at this time. Heck, I’m not sure I’ll even have time to bring the P2V’ed servers up to the latest LTS release, much less split up services and migrate to a different edition. But I do plan to play with it some, and may propose it to IT for the radius server we’ll need to build.
VMWare ESXi 4.0 is out. It has most of what I’ve been wanting in ESXi, in particular IDE support. 4.0 supports SATA drives in the host, and IDE drives and some form of USB in the guest OS.
Ever since windows 98, I’ve has a policy of never running anything ending on .0 in a production capacity. I’ve got it running in the lab at work and look forward to putting it through the rounds when I get back from my business trip.
Tags: vmware
I’m not a big fan of the idea of VMware running on a host OS for production servers. One reason for that is that you have direct access to the VMware data files.
You could do something unfortunate, like:
cp server-flat.vmdk /backup_location/server-flat.vmdk
gzip server-flat.vmdk
You won’t notice your mistake for weeks or months. So long as that VM is running it will keep an open file handle to the uncompressed file. You might notice some weirdness with “df” but that is about it.
Of course once you do restart the VM or reboot the VMware host OS, you’ll discover your harddrive is gone, and that backup is several months old.
Tags: Stupid Unix Tricks, vmware
