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VMware - Virtual machines under Linux/FreeBSD

Usually we do not feature commercial products specially, but VMware is here an exception, both in its own aim and as well in its application. And no, we don't own any shares of this company ;-)

1. Introduction
2. OS'es under VMware (Linux)
3. Notes
4. Further Resources

VMware is a programm allowing you to run virtual machines which each one behaves like PC itself. Resources can be shared, networked and combined. It is certainly, in my eyes, one of the most innovative products of the recent years.

VMware.Com The official home

Explore their site, it has a lot of information to check, also mailing-list & newsgroups exist with a lot shared experiences of users of vmware.

Virtualization

Virtualization is kind of buzz-word through the computing community, but vmware actually provides it on a very low-level, it abstracts hardware-layer and BIOS and pretends to be a PC. Running a PC within a PC. I'm a firm believer in abstraction-layers and virtualization. For me all levels should be virtualized, and proves thereby its own superior design; e.g. a window-system correct designed should be able to run itself in a window, or a CPU should be able to run itself within (virtual machine) and so on.

Real Usage

We use vmware on several machines which solely operate as vmware-hosts, each machines has 128MB and runs three to four virtual-machines (-display to remote site) which each one has its own IP and this way truly looks from outside as you have four machines. Currently three physical machines hosts 10 virtual machines testing installations, network and inter-OS operateablity.

VMware 2. OS'es under VMware (Linux)

We use vmware under Linux (host-OS) and run following OS as guests: (icons lead to fullscreen screenshots, links of OS lead to OS-page)

Linux

Linux (Suse, RedHat, Mandrake) When installing any Linux-dist choose text-mode and not graphic-mode as the speed difference is immense (factor 3-5). RedHat 6.2 did well and ran smooth, nothing special was to be consider as we installed the "Server" option (no X11).

FreeBSD

FreeBSD (4.0 & 4.1) create new config with the Wizard, after the machine is configured and booted you get into the install (FreeBSD CD): the installation is very user-friendly (among *BSD the best). "Express Installation" is quite handy, and indeed fast. disk-layout: FreeBSD lives within a partition (aka a slice in BSD terminology) defined with fdisk and within this slice the BSD-partitions are allocated (using disklabel), for simplicity create two partitions: / (root partition) swap More infos you find here.

OpenBSD

OpenBSD (2.7) The installation of OpenBSD isn't very user-friendly I have to say (unless you are an experienced BSD sysadmin). Some hints for OpenBSD with VMWare: assuming you got the OpenBSD-CD, configure new virtual machine with the Wizard (select "Other"), power-on, CD boots and you are in the install automatically . . . once you answered the simple questions you are asked if you want to use wd0 entirely, answer it with yes or no, you end up in the disklabel anyway, and here do following: type d (for delete) then RETURN, enter a (delete the 'a' partition) type a (for add) then RETURN, ignore offset input, simply hit RETURN, enter size like 340M (choose size total_disk_space - swap_size, where as swap_size is chosen twice the physical RAM size), once asked about mounting-point enter / type a again, size 60M, then it will know it is the swap (wd0b) type q to save partition-table back to disk and quit  wd0a  /   wd0b  swap  now the rest of the install runs, and questions/answers are obvious (mostly confirm defaults with hitting RETURN) (Check also INSTALL.i386 for more details or lack of it) More infos you find here.

NetBSD

NetBSD (1.4.2) Installation with VMWare was easy and rather user-friendly (compared to OpenBSD). Just run Wizard within vmware, chose "Other" for Operating System, virtual-disk, etc, power-on and have NetBSD-CD insert, and go ahead, and you are done in few mins. More infos you find here.

QNX

QNX (1.4MB demo disk) Just put the demo-floppy-disk and boot the virtual machine . . . More infos you find here.

WinXX

You can also run Win95, Win98, Win2000, WinME and all the other Windows 'patches', but we won't focus on this here.

VMware 3. Notes

VMware-3.0 provides very good functionality, but it doesn't work under XFree86-4.3.0 with Xinerama enabled, the vmware fails with "Cannot initialize SVGA". VMware-4.0 does better and has nicer (more useable) GUI, but fails to run BeOS which VMware-3.0 did quite fine.

I upgraded from VMware-3.0 to 4.0 as I work on a three screens using Xinerama. My recommendation, don't upgrade unless you need a certain feature.

VMware 4. Further Resources

FAUMachine.org Another approach (open source)	SimOS Source code and papers, some from the developers of VMware before they went commercial.	QEmu Another open-source project, runs Linux, NetBSD (other OS support underway)
Plex86 Open-source project of virtualizing machines (VM)	Bochs IA-32 Emulator

                                                                                                                                   

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