I thought I had already posted this, but I looked the other day and didn’t find the article, so I’m posting it now… if it’s a duplicate, sorry… I’m still using Ubuntu’s Dapper Drake 6.06(.1) as a base install for many things… the Long term support idea fo rthe server “stuff” is somewhat reassuring and I don’t want to be chasing minor revision upgrades every 6 months. But, there is another reason, a lot of the installs I’ve done have been a base for VMWare server and there are some very good (and clear) how-to’s in that arena….howtoforge has a good walkthrough that I’ve used as a starting point….
Category: VMware
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VMware guest unable to access USB devices
I ran into this some time back and found the solution a few months later and was reminded today to document it here…. The situation is this… Linux host for VMWare server, the guest machine has usb support and in vmware, you can go to VM, Removable devices and in spite of the fact you have usb devices on the system, nothing is listed as available to use in the VM. Well, it seems this is not an isolated problem. First you need to be sure the usb device is not in use by the host system. But, there’s something else that you need. VMWare uses usbfs to keep track of usb devices and a few distributions ( Ubuntu Linux 6.06 SUSE Linux 10.1, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 10, Mandriva Linux 2006, SLES9 SP3 64 bit) don’t enable it by default. ( mount -t usbfs none /proc/bus/usb ) should do the trick (as root) or you could set it in fstab usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto 0 0 (and now I’m thinking I may have already posted this once…. )
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Vmware Server web interface tricks…
I haven’t been overwhelmed with VMware server’s web interface. You can start a virtual machine, or see statistics, but you can’t create virtual machines. Well, from the VMWare forums I did find a couple interesting “hidden” features. First, is a file manager at https://youriphere:8333/fm-properties and second is a GSX interface (which gives the ability to create a NEW virtual machine) at https://youriphere:8333/overview (the direct link to creating a new vm is https://yourip:8333/vmcfg-gsx )….
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Live filesystem “capture” into a virtual disk image
ah… the joys of *nix utilities…. I’ve just successfully tested a “capture” of a live, running system into a virtual disk image. No, I don’t mean that I booted up with an imaging utility. I took a live, booted and logged in system and imaged the primary hard drive that it was living on, into a file on another machine. (Yeah, I know, there are probably a few people reading this and saying they’ve done that and most people that would need to do this already know how…. sorry I missed the memo.) Not too long ago, VMWare released a tool to do something like this (that tool is for windows…) This should work on any platform that supports dd and netcat (although I’m not sure if piping output from one program to another works with a dos command shell – maybe cygwin would be a good environment to accomplish this with.) Anyway… here are the details.
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VMware server usb devices not listed on Mandriva host
I’ve been using vmware server quite a bit of course, I’ve mentioned it before. I had never played around with accessing a usb device in the guest environment though. When I tried (host operating system is Mandriva 2006)…. nothing was listed, in spite of several devices being plugged in (and unmounted from the host.) So, I looked around and found that according to this…. that vmware feature requires USBFS to be mounted on /proc/bus/usb …. Some systems that don’t do this by default are…. Ubuntu Linux 6.06, SUSE Linux 10.1, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 10, Mandriva Linux 2006, SLES9 SP3 64 bit……………. so how do you fix it?
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Vmware launches beta of real to virtual converter
Vmware has launched a tool (windows only it seems) aimed to convert a REAL running system into a virtual machine. (For use with VMWare’s virtualization products. The converter also can convert images from competing virtual machine “platforms”(?) (Microsoft Virtual PC, Microsoft Virtual Server, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (formerly LiveState Recovery) and Norton Ghost9 (or higher) to VMware virtual machine disk format.)
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Virtual Machine of a real hard drive
This incidents.org article the other day caught my eye. It talked of a utility calledliveview that could take a hard drive (or image of a drive) and make it into a virtual machine for use in vmware (saving all changes to a temporary file so the original structure of the disk/drive image is not touched.) It looks like you need to have Windows as your base platform, but it looks as though it would be a useful tool. Windows Incident Response possibly saw the same note on Incidents.org.
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Vmware coming to Mac soon…
It looks as though VMWare is looking to test some of their software for the Mac. Unlike Parallels desktop, Vmware’s offering will be geared more towards a corporate environment.
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VM Player vmx builder
Of course, I’ve spent some time with posts on VMware player (free download to “play” existing vmware images). And more recently on the VMware server which is also a free download but can create images as well. If you’re not in a position to try the VMWare server, you might be interested in this website which walks you through to create the vmx file that defines a virtual machine environment for vmware products. Of course, it doesn’t create the actual disk images for you, but you can use free tools like those supplied with qemu to do that.