Jason L. Froebe - Tech tips and How Tos for Fellow Techies » VMware

High overview of Cloud Computing with Ubuntu Eucalyptus Cloud (UEC) from Canonical

Jason L Froebe — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:52:15 +0000

I installed Ubuntu Eucalyptus cloud (#UEC) on a couple of servers at home. I was naively expecting it to be similar to VMware. Oh I was wrong.

UEC is the Eucalyptus ‘cloud’ software running on Ubuntu servers. The instances would run under the KVM or Xen hypervisors. Ubuntu’s defaulted to running KVM but isn’t restricted by it.

“Eucalyptus is a software available under GPL that helps in creating and managing a private or even a publicly accessible cloud. It provides an EC2 compatible cloud computing platform and S3 compatible cloud storage platform…” Eucalyptus Beginner’s Guide

This is how a vm works in UEC:

You publish an image that you previously installed all the software you need (or you can download such an image). There can be as many instances of this image running as the hardware supports (spread across N number of backend Node Servers).

All instances are transient. As long as an image is running, it will have a physical presence.. but when it is shutdown, the instance is removed including any work performed in the instance.

“static” storage is available via a Storage Server. After you create an image but before you start it, you have the opportunity to attach storage to the instance.

Diagram courtesy of Eucalyptus Beginner’s Guide – UEC edition

While the management tools for UEC, and therefore Amazon EC2/EM, are primitive compared to VMware, it should be able to scale much higher with far less focus on which ‘virtual machine’ goes where.

Using VMware vCenter Converter and getting a SQL_CANTOPEN or similar error

Jason L Froebe — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 17:24:48 +0000

Using VMware vCenter Converter and getting a SQL_CANTOPEN or similar error? Make sure your backup (Carbonite in my case) is disabled else it may try to backup the database for the converter and lock the files from being written to. Anyone know where VMware keeps this database?

VMware 2.0.2 running on Win2k3 -> VMware ESX 4.0 .. done :)

Jason L Froebe — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 17:37:58 +0000

I was able to move a VMware Server 2.0 (v7) vm to VMware ESX.. it was a *live* copy where I performed a Windows Volume Shadow copy of the vm files. Everything worked for the most part but because the database, Sybase ASE 15.0.3, was running when the shadow copy was made, we had corruption in one database. Restore from backup and all is good.

Now we need to get an updated license file from Sybase as the NIC mac address has changed.. You can *not* use the mac address from the VMware Server on ESX. grr.

Twenty hours for the volume shadow copy to complete plus another 12 hours to scp the files to the esx box (esx console access is sloooow). Keep in mind that the host VMware Server box was rebooting itself randomly so I really couldn’t leave it alone. Then 3 hours to convert/clone the vmdk files and 2 hours to correct the database… I’m tired.

It turned out to be an issue with allocating 3.75GB to a VM that was causing the rebooting. Dropping it to 2 GB resolved the rebooting… who knew? Nothing in Google and VMware Support wasn’t able to find anything on their side.

How to: Installing VMware ESXi 4 on a 6 year old cheap motherboard

Jason L Froebe — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:59:17 +0000

I’ve been trying to get VMware ESXi 4 on my old MSI MS-7388 motherboard for a long time. No matter what I tried, neither the SATA controller on the motherboard or the add on SATA controller would be recognized.

Install VMware ESXi 4.0 on an unsupported motherboard (SATA controller must support AHCI):

make sure the SATA controller(s) is set to AHCI in the computer’s BIOS
download VMware ESXi 4 iso
burn the iso to either a cdrom or a USB thumb drive (512mb minimum) using unetbootin
boot the computer into VMware ESXi
Before you’re prompted to hit Enter to begin, hit ALT-F1 which will get you to a console screen without a prompt
Type “unsupported” followed by Enter
When prompted for a password, just hit Enter
Type “vmkload_mod ahci” followed by Enter. This will load in the driver for just about any AHCI compliant SATA controller
Hit ALT-F2 to finish the installation

At this point VMware ESXi 4.0 will be installed but it won’t start when you reboot. This is because VMware won’t load the AHCI driver by default. So… we will have to tell it to load it automatically. You will need a Linux Live CD such as Ubuntu.

Boot into Linux
From the desktop you will need to mount the VMware partitions. In Ubuntu 8.04 and higher, you just need to click on the folders in the drop down menu
Locate oem.tgz on the second VMware partition and overwrite it with this oem.tgz. It includes a system.map file telling VMware to load the AHCI driver
reboot and boot into VMware ESXi

You should have a fully working VMware ESXi server installed and ready for you to setup virtual machines!

Installing Oracle 10g / 11g on Ubuntu 8.04.1 (Hardy Heron) Server JEOS in VMware Server 1.0x/2.0x

Jason L Froebe — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:36:26 +0000

I’ve been tasked with becoming an Oracle DBA, so I need to be able to create an VMware Server image containing 32 bit Ubuntu 8.04.1 Server JEOS and Oracle 10g. Much of the work was taken from Augusto Bott‘s Installing Oracle 11g on Ubuntu Linux 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) and Peter Cooper‘s How to Install VMware Tools on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 under VMware Fusion.

I was able to consolidate the methods to work rather well together. As soon as Ubuntu 8.10 Server JEOS (Intrepid) is released, I’ll verify the procedure on that operating system as well.

If you’re looking for instructions on how to install Oracle 11 XE on Ubuntu 8.04.1, look at Installing Oracle Database XE on Debian, Ubuntu, and Kubuntu by Todd Trichler.

Create a VMware Image with the following settings

Choose 32bit Ubuntu for the OS type
1024 MBytes RAM
16GBytes disk space
Ubuntu 8.04.1 (or higher) Server JEOS edition http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/serveredition/jeos
Upon the os installation, create a non “oracle” id to use to administer the os.

Install the required updates and packages

$ sudo aptitude update
$ sudo aptitude safe-upgrade
$ sudo aptitude install build-essential xinetd linux-headers-`uname -r` openssh-client openssh-server unzip libaio1 gawk ksh rpm libmotif3 alien lsb-rpm libtool libxtst-dev libxtst6 libstdc++5

Add swap

$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/extraswap bs=1M count=1536
$ sudo mkswap /extraswap
$ sudo swapon /extraswap
$ sudo echo "/extraswap none swap sw 0 0" >> /etc/fstab
# "/sbin/swapon -s" should show the added swap space
$ /sbin/swapon -s
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/mapper/oracle10g-swap_1 partition 401400 92 -1
/extraswap file 1048568 0 -2

If VMware Server version is 2.0x or higher, install VMware tools:

$ sudo su – root
$ mount /dev/cdrom
$ cp /media/cdrom/*.gz ~
$ tar zxvf VMwareTools*.tar.gz
$ cd vmware-tools-distrib
$ ./vmware-install.pl

If VMware Server version is 1.0x, install VMware tools:

$ sudo su – root
$ mount /dev/cdrom
$ cp /media/cdrom/*.gz ~
$ aptitude install libgtk2.0-dev libproc-dev libdumbnet-dev xorg-dev wget
$ wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/open-vm-tools/open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf VMware*.gz ; sudo tar xzvf open-vm-tools*.gz ; cd open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/
$ ./configure && make
$ cd modules/linux/
$ for i in *; do mv ${i} ${i}-only; tar -cf ${i}.tar ${i}-only; done
$ cd ../../..
$ mv -f open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/modules/linux/*.tar vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source/ ; cd vmware-tools-distrib/
$ sudo ./vmware-install.pl
$ sudo reboot

Append to /etc/sysctl.conf

$ sudo cat >> /etc/sysctl.conf << EOF
fs.file-max = 65535
kernel.shmall = 2097152
kernel.shmmax = 2147483648
kernel.shmmni = 4096
kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65535
net.core.rmem_default = 1048576
net.core.rmem_max = 1048576
net.core.wmem_default = 262144
net.core.wmem_max = 262144
EOF

Append to /etc/security/limits.conf

$ sudo cat >> /etc/security/limits.conf << EOF
oracle soft nproc 2047
oracle hard nproc 16383
oracle soft nofile 1023
oracle hard nofile 65535
EOF

Append to /etc/pam.d/login

$ sudo cat >> /etc/pam.d/login << EOF
session required /lib/security/pam_limits.so
session required pam_limits.so
EOF

Set up user / groups

$ sudo su – root
$ addgroup oinstall ; addgroup dba ; addgroup nobody ; usermod -g nobody nobody ; useradd -g oinstall -G dba -p password -d /home/oracle -s /bin/bash oracle
$ passwd oracle
Password changed.
$ mkdir /home/oracle ; chown -R oracle:dba /home/oracle ; ln -s /usr/bin/awk /bin/awk ; ln -s /usr/bin/rpm /bin/rpm ; ln -s /usr/bin/basename /bin/basename ; mkdir /etc/rc.d
$ for i in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 S ; do ln -s /etc/rc$i.d /etc/rc.d/rc$i.d ; done
$ mkdir -p /dbms/oracle ; chown -R oracle:dba /dbms/oracle ; sysctl -p
$ reboot

Retrieve Oracle 10g zip file

Copy the Oracle install zip file from disc or somewhere
Unzip it

Retrieve IP of the network card

$ ifconfig |grep "Bcast"

Install / Configure oracle manually verifying any requirements:

$ ssh -C -X oracle@(ipaddress)
…
$ cd /home//database
$ ./runInstaller -ignoreSysPrereqs

iSQL*Plus URL:

http://(ipaddress):5560/isqlplus

iSQL*Plus DBA URL:

http://(ipaddress):5560/isqlplus/dba

Enterprise Manager 10g Database Control URL:

http://(ipaddress):1158/em

Been a long time / Installing vmware tools in Ubuntu 8.04.1 JEOS Server

Jason L Froebe — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 22:03:45 +0000

I’m sorry folks, I got wrapped up in the ways of the physical world and then was sick the past few days.

Recently I tried installing vmware tools in a Ubuntu 8.04.1 JEOS Server virtual machine with no success. After a bit of googling, I came across the Peter Cooper’s blog that outlined the procedure rather well for VMware Fusion, but it works for VMware Server and VMware Workstation just fine. Essentially:

download Open VM Tools from Sourceforge
Mount VMware tools (Host -> VM -> Install VMware Tools), mount /dev/cdrom
Extract the vmware tools to /tmp
Extract and compile Open VM Tools (./configure)
Tar up the compiled open vm tools and copy to the vmware tools directory
Run vmware-install.pl

See Peter’s blog for step by step instructions.

Anybody running VMware’s VMotion in production?

Jason L Froebe — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:50:03 +0000

Don’t know what VMware VMotion is? VMotion allows you to easily move one virtual machine to another VMware ESX host that is connected to the same storage mechanism (presumably SAN) with no downtime. Looks promising

Image courtesy of VMware

Dell has a demonstration using Microsoft SQL Server where they move the live SQL Server from one blade to another with no outage:

Adding a Virtual Disk Device to a VMware virtual machine (Windows 2003 Server host)

Jason L Froebe — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:00:10 +0000

I thought it would be possible to add a virtual device file to a running virtual machine and have it show up in the virtual machine without restarting the virtual machine. I was wrong. The current VMware Server 1.0.6 is incapable of doing this. What you can do is to set up the device file so all you have to do is to restart the virtual machine, minimizing downtime to a couple of minutes:

Create a new 20GB preallocated disk in the D:\Virtual Devices\DBA Dev 1\Disk4 directory:

D:\Virtual Machines\DBA Dev 1\Disk 4>vmware-vdiskmanager -c -a buslogic -s 20Gb -t 3 Disk4.vmdk
Using log file C:\DOCUME~1\ADMINI~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\vmware-DBH1admin\vdiskmanager.log
Creating a split preallocated disk ‘Disk4.vmdk’
Create: 100% done.
Virtual disk creation successful.

We need to determine which device slots are available. Go to VM->Settings and look at the next free scsi device #

Associate the new virtual device file using the free scsi4 slot

D:\Virtual Machines\DBA Dev 1>vmware-cmd “D:\Virtual Machines\DBA Dev 1\Ubuntu.vmx” setconfig scsi4:1.fileName “Disk 4\Disk4.vmdk”
setconfig(scsi4:1.fileName Disk 4\Disk4.vmdk) = 1
D:\Virtual Machines\DBA Dev 1>vmware-cmd -v “D:\Virtual Machines\DBA Dev 1\Ubuntu.vmx” setconfig scsi4:1.present true
API Version: 1.01
setconfig(scsi4:1.present true) = 1

After you restart the virtual machine, the device will now show up when you run fdisk -l.

VMware – copied the Ubuntu vm but now the networking doesn’t work?

Jason L Froebe — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:09:34 +0000

You’ve probably seen it, you copied an Ubuntu Linux virtual machine under VMware and tried starting it up with a new VMware UUID and the networking doesn’t work. When you use a new VMware UUID, it will change the mac address on any virtual network device you have configured in the virtual machine.

A very simple ‘fix’:

In /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rule, delete the entry for your network device(s) so the new mac address is recognized on reboot. It will look something like so:

# PCI device 0×1022:0×2000 (pcnet32)
SUBSYSTEM==”net”, ACTION==”add”, DRIVERS==”?*”, ATTR{address}==”00:0c:29:aa:4c:75″, ATTR{type}==”1″, KERNEL==”eth*”, NAME=”eth0″

Your network devices will now be working. Don’t forget to reboot your virtual machine.

ubuntu server 7.10 as a vmware guest on an ubuntu 8.04 host, requires ‘clock=pit’

Jason L Froebe — Wed, 21 May 2008 16:31:23 +0000

In order to avoid a drifting time clock in “ubuntu server 7.10″ vmware guest machine on an ubuntu 8.04 host, you need to do a few things:

/etc/vmware/config

host.cpukHz = 2000000 <– replace # with speed of your cpu (2GHz listed here)

host.noTSC = TRUE

ptsc.noTSC = TRUE

‘clock=pit’ added to the kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst
tools.syncTime = “TRUE” in the (vmware_guest).vmx file

VMware Workstation 5 or 6 and trying to start a 64bit os?

Jason L Froebe — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 21:08:29 +0000

Is you’re running on an Intel x86-64 processor based box and VMware Workstation complains that the host machine is incompatible with working with your Windows 2003 64bit client os (or any other 64bit client OS)? Well, go into your BIOS on boot and make sure that the VT functionality is enabled.

Unable to remotely connect to VMware Server on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty)?

Jason L Froebe — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 12:33:27 +0000

VMware Server running on Ubuntu 64bit:

The problem is that the Ubuntu package is a 32bit package and doesn’t take into consideration that pam 64bit will try to load the 32 bit libraries as 64 bit libraries. The workaround, discovered by PLM is to replace /etc/pam.d/vmware-authd with:

#%PAM-1.0
auth       sufficient       /usr/lib/vmware-server/lib/libpam.so.0/security/pam_unix2.so shadow nullok
auth       required         /usr/lib/vmware-server/lib/libpam.so.0/security/pam_unix_auth.so shadow nullok
account    sufficient       /usr/lib/vmware-server/lib/libpam.so.0/security/pam_unix2.so
account    required         /usr/lib/vmware-server/lib/libpam.so.0/security/pam_unix_acct.so

VMware Server running on Ubuntu 32bit:

The problem is that for Ubuntu 32bit, the pam authentication lines in /etc/pam.d/vmware-authd are wrong and need to be replaced by:

#%PAM-1.0
auth required pam_unix_auth.so shadow nullok
account required pam_unix_acct.so

Virtualization and Databases

Jason L Froebe — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 13:23:40 +0000

In Chris Brown‘s Virtualization and ASE blog post, he brings up the question of whether Sybase’s ASE can be used in a virtual environment (VMWare, Xen, etc) but doesn’t answer it. I’ve been using various databases in virtual environments for several years, here is what I found out:

Running ASE, ASIQ, or SQL Anywhere under virtualization software such as Xen, VMWare, Parallels, etc is very useful under a number of situations:

development of new applications – each developer group can have its own “db server” on the same machine
testing new ebfs/releases with your applications
reproducing problems either in the sybase software or in the application code – a ‘virgin’ instance that can be duplicated at will
trying out new operating systems (moving from Windows to Linux or Windows to Solaris x86?) without investing in new hardware

The main caveat is that the performance stinks – databases typically require high disk i/o, memory i/o and cpu responsiveness. The virtualization software currently available, even with hardware help (newer Intel,AMD chips), are not up to the task of running a *production* database. In a couple years… possibly.