Monthly Archives: October 2007

VMware Virtual Center 1.4.1 and VMware Server 1.0.4 (minimal)

VMware Virtual Center 1.4.1 and VMware Server 1.0.4 on IBM PIII Thinkpads !

They said it wasn’t possible !

VMWARE

http://www.flickr.com/photos/osde-info/1803072059/

Next I’ll see if I can get a Red Hat 8 VM guest actually running in the 64M available

NOTE You must set up network labels on VMware Server before you try and add a new VM using VC (to prevent getting the “VMware VirtualCenter cannot create a virtual NIC until physical networks have been labelled for this server” error !

flickr

http://www.flickr.com/photos/osde-info/1803072051/

You can find this on the  VMware Server Console | VM tab

flickr

http://www.flickr.com/photos/osde-info/1804067104/

VMware Virtual Center 1.4.1 and VMware Server

Here are some VMware Virtual Center 1.4.1 (VMWVC) with VMware Server (VMWSVR) demo / 30 day eval tips:

  • Don’t be put off by the VMWVC min spec of P4 & 2G RAM – it works (for demo/eval purposes) on a PIII with only 256M RAM !
  • Make sure you install VMWSVR on CentOS/Red Hat/Oracle instead of Debi/Ubun (so you can connect as root from VMWVC to VMWSVR)
  • Make sure you install the VMWSVR MUI Console
  • Remember you first need to add a Farm Group and then a Farm before you can do File | New | Add Host and then finally add any optional Virtual Machine Groups
  • Don’t run the Server Console against the VMWSVR you wish to manage with VMWVC

vmware vc and server

VMware Server icon dies

If your VMware Server icon dies as soon as you click on it try running it from the command line instead [$ vmware] and you might get a more detailed error message such as:

“VMware isinstalled, but it has not been (correctly) configured for this system.
To (re-)configure it, invoke the following command:/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl.”

this may mean you’ve recently autoupdated/aptituded/up2dated or yummed the kernel on your host OS so you need to re-run /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

VMware Virtual Centre 1.4.1 documentation

According to http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vc_pubs.html VC 1.4.1 needs

  • A minimum of 2GB RAM for VirtualCenter configurations managing 50 managed hosts or fewer. For greater than 50 managed hosts configurations, use 3GB RAM. For configurations with 100 managed hosts running 2000 virtual machines, use 4GB RAM.
  • As a minimum a Pentium IV 2.0Ghz processor. Dual processors are
    recommended for deployments with more than 25 managed hosts.
  • Disk space sufficient on the machine to support the VirtualCenter database and the template upload directory.

I wonder how much “sufficient” is ?