Well, I’ve started messing around with virtualization. Saying I’ve only scratched the surface is an understatement, but you’ve got to start somewhere, right? I Installed VMware Server 2 on my Centos 5.3 machine, and then installed Windows 7 Release Candidate as a virtual machine. This was all easier than my initial installation of Centos on my home built PC. It’s really just installing software and allocating resources of the host machine to the guest machines.
I downloaded VMware Server (The 64 bit Linux RPM package) from http://www.vmware.com/freedownload/login.php?product=server20 as well as the User Guide from http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/server_pubs.html. You will have to register with an email address on the VMWare site to access the downloads.
Chapter 2 of the User Guide walks you through the install. For me it looked like this:
After downloading the rpm package, I moved it to /tmp and checked the checksum vs. the value on the VMware download page. (It matched, trust me)
[markste@sserver VMware]$ cd /tmp
[markste@sserver tmp]$ ls -l VM*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 markste markste 456099794 Jul 27 11:21 VMware-server-2.0.1-156745.x86_64.rpm
[markste@sserver tmp]$ openssl dgst -md5 VMware-server-2.0.1-156745.x86_64.rpm
MD5(VMware-server-2.0.1-156745.x86_64.rpm)= 697a792c70d50e98a347c06b323bd20b
Then installed it with the instructions in the User Guide, and ran the vmware-config.pl script
Password:
[root@sserver ~]# rpm -Uhv /tmp/VMware-server-2.0.1-156745.x86_64.rpm
Preparing… ########################################### [100%]
1:VMware-server ########################################### [100%]
The installation of VMware Server 2.0.1 for Linux completed successfully.
You can decide to remove this software from your system at any time by
invoking the following command: “rpm -e VMware-server”.
Before running VMware Server for the first time, you need to
configure it for your running kernel by invoking the
following command: “/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl”.
Enjoy,
–the VMware team
[root@sserver ~]# vmware-config.pl
In this script, I had to:
- Accept the EULA
- Configure networking (make all three types: bridged, NAT and host-only. When you build virtual machines, you may then select which type of network connection you want for each virtual machine. More info about the network types in chapter 11 of the User’s Guide)
- Set an administrator name (user on the computer)
- Set some port numbers (used defaults)
- Set some directories to store files. I did not like that the virtual machine files would, by default, be stored in /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines (space in directory name – yuck) so I changed it to /var/lib/vmware/VirtualMachines.
- Enter your license key, provided on the VMware download page.
Once it was installed, I fired up Firefox, aimed at http://localhost:8222 which started the VI Web Access (VMware Servers UI). This is when I realized that /var was too small. I decided to grow /var, since it was a logical volume and i had available space in the Volume Group. (This is worthy of it’s own post).
I configured my first virtual machine using Chapter 4 of the User Guide and the wizard. Then I placed my Windows 7 RC installation DVD into the drive and powered on the Virtual Machine, and completed the install of the guest OS. Poof! Virtualization experienced.
Still loads and loads (and loads?) to learn, but it’s been good to see the allocation of host resources for the guest machines, as well as the representation of virtual hardware to the guest OS.