unixwiz

I began setting up my new sun server and san at home the other day.. (Picked up a Sun V20Z and a Sun T3 SAN Disk array very cheap)… Because I am going to be doing some IPv6 testing as well, I installed a Sun Gigaswift (aka Sun’s ce, Cassini Ethernet) card in to the machine along with the fibre channel card. I put the VMWare vSphere 4i cd in and went on with the install. But didn’t really pay attention that it did not see the CE card, just the two broadcom cards.. So I went ahead any ways thinking I will fix it later. But it seems that there is no drivers on the interweb for the Sun CE card for vmware? If any one knows of a place to get them let me know? Otherwise I will have to find a new card to use in it’s place.

Sun, VMWare Cassini, Ethernet, Sun, V20Z, VMWare

For some reason last night my Windows XP image in VMWare fusion locked up during a update to the Microsoft Security stuff. I tried doing the “Virtual Machine -> Shutdown” which looked like it was going to work. However Windows just set for ever on the “Shutting Down Windows” screen. Well if you hold down the Option key when you click on the “Virtual Machine” menu item, the word “Force” shows up in front of all the options. This is the equivalent of pressing the power button when you click “Force Shutdown”. With out that, VMWare is trying to do a “nice” shutdown. So I forced a “reset” and everything came up fine… Hope this helps some one else who is “hung”

VMWare Fusion, Tip, VMWare

I finally got time again to start playing with Sun Ray 5 Early Access software. Now my current setup probably should not be used for any type of test more than simple single/dual user testing. But I did not want to test the software on the current working server. So I decided to install it in a VMWare image on my Mac Pro. The Mac Pro is more than suited to handle it and had plenty of free memory/processor/storage to use so there was no contention (I gave the VM 4 processors and 8 gig of ram)..

The kicker was getting VMWare Fusion to actually allocate the network cards the way I needed them. I gave the VM 2 nics (the Mac Pro has 2), however the only options that VMWare Fusion let you do is NAT, Host-Only, and Bridged. None of which will work if I want a private network for the Sun Ray’s. To fix this you will need to go and edit some files that VMWare Fusion uses. What I had to do was the following:

1. Open up the Terminal app
2. Edit the file /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/boot.sh

3. Comment out the following line:

And then add 2 lines directly below that line, which tells vmware to bind the en0 physical device to the vmnet0 virtual device, same for en1 to vmnet2. Note you can not use vmnet1 or vmnet8 as those are for NAT and Host-only connections.

Once done, do the following:

Now go in to your Mac System Preferences and configure the second network card for a private subnet (i.e. 192.168.128.0/24, and set the IP to be something like 192.168.128.254).

Now make sure that your VM is NOT started and is in a powered off state. Go in to the VM and under the settings for that VM add another network adapter, make sure it is selected as “Connected” it doesn’t matter what the device is configured to as we will change it later to an option that is not shown in that list.

Now you need to change the .VMX file so that it can use the new network device. So go in to the directory where you have your VM’s at and then cd in to the machine.vmwarevm directory (For example mine is called SolarisDev.vmwarevm)

Once in there you will need to edit the vmx file, mine is called SolarisDev.vmx. The first thing we are going to change is the ethernet0.connectionType property. Right now it could be any of the ones listed (host-only,bridged, nat). But we are going to change this to “custom”:

Next find the entry for ethernet0.vnet, if it doesn’t exist create it and make it look like the line below. If it does exist and doesn’t match that below, make it match that:

Now we need to do the same for the ethernet1 entries. The only difference to what is above is vmnet0 changes to vmnet2. Once the changes are made you can save the file and start up your Solaris VM. Now what ever network is on your en0 connection on your Mac should be what is connected to the e1000g0 network on the Solaris side. I used the e1000g0 as the “public” side of the Sun Ray server. The e1000g1 interface will be what ever is connected on the en1 connection on the Mac side. I used this adapter for the private Sun Ray Lan.

You should be able to finish following the instructions on the Sun Ray wiki now and get everything configured.

To test the soft client, I set up LAN Connections on the Sun Ray Server:

I then installed the soft client in another VM on the same machine that only had access to the public network. You then can tell the soft client what the IP of the Sun Ray server is and it will connect. Pretty darn cool that the soft client works with minimal config.

This can probably be done on a MacBook Pro as well, if you use the wireless connection as the public side and the wired as the private side. Nice way to do a little demo in one computer.

For reference here is what my network section of the .vmx file looks like :

References:
Sun Ray Software 4.2 Wiki: http://wikis.sun.com/display/SRSS4dot2/Home

Apple, MacOSX, Solaris, Sun, Sun Ray, Sun Ray @Home Fusion, MacOS, MacPro, Solaris, Sun Ray, Sun Ray 5 Early Access, Sun Ray @Home, VMWare

Have been playing around with VMWare’s vSphere 4i today. One of the major differences between it and the full version is being able to clone and make templates out of VM images. What I did today was setup a machine with a bunch of Solaris VM’s. But I did not want to installed them all from scratch. On the full version of ESX, cloning is supported for Windows and I believe Linux, but don’t think it is for Solaris. So to do the poor mans clone of Solaris was what I needed to do. So how do you do it? Sort of simple:

1. Install one of the VM’s from scratch from either a CD or ISO Image. (You can upload an ISO image to the server by going in to to the Configuration section of the vSphere Client, and clicking on storage and then browse the datastore. What I did was make a directory for the ISO Images, and then you can click the upload button and find the file on the local machine and it will upload it to the server. It makes it a lot faster to install from an ISO image vs the CDRom).

2. Once the OS is installed, I put the latest Security/Recommended patches on it. I also installed the VMWare Tools.

3. Do any “configuration” that you want to be done for all the VM’s. For example, modify the /etc/issue,/etc/ssh/sshd_config, create non root accounts, enable auditing, disable services, etc.

4. The next thing I did was ran a “sys-unconfig”. This will remove the root user’s password, clear the hostname, clear all IP information and the naming service info. It will leave other local created accounts though.

5. The final step of the sys-unconfig, halts the VM. This will be the “last” time you will boot this image. We will now use it as a poor man’s template for our other VM’s. (The reason I say last is unless you are going to update it to be used to “clone” new vm’s, you should never boot it again.) You should also probably rename this virtual machine to be something like “Solaris – Template – DNB” (DNB=Do Not Boot… )

6. Back in the Datastore browser, create a new folder for the to be “cloned” vm.

7. Now go in to the folder of the original vm you made that is in the “unconfiged” state. Once in there, select ALL the files in there and right click and select copy.

8. Now go to the newly created folder, and go in to it and right click and select paste. For a VM with a 20gb disk this takes about a minute or so to copy and paste.

9. Now go in to the cloned directory and right click on the VMX file and select “Add to Inventory”. It will pop up a dialog box and will let you “name” the new vm. Type in the new name of the new vm. (It won’t change the name of the files in that directory though.)

10. Next you can power on the new “cloned” vm. It will give you a pop up box asking if you have “moved” it or “copied” it or something else. Just select copied, and it will load the VM.

11. Now when Solaris boots, it will look like a clean machine, it will ask you for the hostname, ip, name service, etc, and then reboot after you enter in the information.

All said I did about 12 of these and had them all running at the same time and didn’t have a problem with them. If you need some different “hardware” for a vm, before you power it on, you can change the settings just as if you had installed it from scratch. One thing with the new vSphere it will support adding more than just a disk if the OS supports it. So you should be able to add processors, disk and possibly memory on the fly to a solaris VM.

Hope that helps people with the i version of ESX…

Solaris, VMWare cloning, ESX, ESXi, Solaris, template, VMWare, vSphere