[lugip] vmware?

[Brian Jones]

Hi Tom!

On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 8:02 AM, Tom Reingold <noglider at pobox.com> wrote:
> I'm glad this discussion came out. I've been using vmware since April. I
> worked at Seton Hall University in South Orange, NJ for a few months. There,
> they have a huge commitment to vmware and are using ESX. Interestingly, they
> recently came up with an interesting policy: vmware on everything. If an
> application justifies occupying an entire server, they will still put vmware
> on it and then a single VM for the application. This way, if the hardware
> fails, they can move the VM to another machine quickly and easily.

This actually isn't particularly unusual in shops that make heavy use
of virtualization, and not necessarily VMWare (I've seen it done with
LVS, Xen, and Solaris zones as well). One benefit, as noted, is the
ability to move services around. Another benefit is the ability to
completely manage the server/service from outside the guest OS. For
example, you can ssh into a solaris base OS install and from there get
a 'console' on any of the zones. It's quite nice.

>
> I have vmware Fusion on my Mac and run Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu
> Linux on it. Very nice.

Agreed, I like it a lot. Haven't tried moving Fusion vm's to an ESX
server yet, but assuming they use the same format for vm's regardless
of the platform they're created on, it should "just work". Still,
verification would be good :)

> Version 1 of vmware server offers vmware server console which runs on
> Windows and Linux. I'm satisifed with it. Version 2 has a similar thing but
> it requires a web browser which must be either Firefox or IE, and it must
> run on Windows. It requirest you to download and install a plugin for the
> browser. I don't like this setup. Also, the console is awfully slow. I hope
> they plan to improve this.

:(
I haven't gotten to use the newer version yet and was not aware of the
windows requirement. I am shocked and apalled. This is almost beyond
belief. I administered ESX for probably 4-5 years while at
cs.princeton.edu, and one great thing about it was that you didn't
have to worry about the platform of the management host. It didn't
much matter. It's sad to see them move backward here.

>
> We tried ubuntu server as a guest operating system. One of my colleagues,
> who does the programming for this project, found some library
> incompatibility problem. I don't remember what it is, so we are using Debian
> for some VM's and Suse for others.

This seems to imply that the library incompatibility was between your
app and ubuntu, not ubuntu and vmware, which I *think* is what John
was suggesting, no? Interested to know if ubuntu and vmware have
issues playing nice together. I believe perhaps *all* of the
Linux-based vm's I've hosted on ESX were RH-based (either RHEL or
CentOS)

>
> I'm having a problem with the networking. Perhaps someone here can help. The
> hosting company does not allow us to use NAT or bridged networking. They
> require us to use host-only networking. We make this work by following their
> suggestion of setting up NAT-like networking using iptables. So each VM gets
> a public IP address. Recently, they issued us some new IP addresses that are
> completely unrelated to the IP address of the vmware host. They won't tell
> us the netmask or the default gateway for these IP addresses, and they tell
> us that we don't need this. The VM's don't know where to route traffic. The
> hosting company won't help us further. How can I do this? I bet it's a
> simple matter, but I haven't figured it out.

Sorry. I have a couple of ideas here, but I'd rather hear from someone
who has actually had to deal with this. My inclination is to either do
what you're doing now, or set up a vm that serves as some sort of
proxy for the rest of the vm's or something like that.

brian









>
> Thanks.
>
> Also of interest is that my client has one client who has the potential to
> bring in lots of money. If that happens, then my client will have the money
> to pay for vmware ESX.
>
> Tom
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-- 
Brian K. Jones
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