Posts with keyword: vmware

10 entries

Fusion 1.1.2

Thu May 1 13:26:00 2008

VMWare released a new version of Fusion last week: 1.1.2. There are a lot of little fixes that if they were a problem for you you'll be very glad to have fixed. If not, you might not notice much difference. I'd been bit a few times by Fusion refusing to release USB resources when it quit. Bottom line: if you're not having any issues, no rush.
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Parallels and OS X Instability

Mon Mar 24 13:10:00 2008

Lately, I've had a very rocky relationship with my Mac Book Pro. One of the things that attracted me to OS X was its stability. Over the past several months (before and after Leopard) my MBP has had trouble with sleeping, waking, and weird, inexplicable freezing. Often when the machine woke up, it would the screen would be black and never come back. The machine would freeze at odd times and nothing would unstick it. I couldn't even log in remotely using SSH, so it was pretty stuck. The final straw was erratic mouse behavior. The mouse seemed sluggish
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Installing Tools in Fusion When They Won't Install

Wed Sep 12 09:43:00 2007

In Fusion (and other virtualization systems) you should install OS tools on the guest OS to make it behave better. This is not something specific to Fusion, this is a general fact of virtualization. Usually, clicking the "Install VMWare Tools" does the trick--especially with Windows. Sometimes, however, it doesn't do anything. On those occasions you need to take over and do it manually. Here's how. First, mount the right ISO as a CDROM image. You'll find these in /Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/isoimages Select the right one for your OS. You may need to manually mount the disk. Fedora, for example,
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P2V: How To Make a Physical Linux Box Into a Virtual Machine

Mon Aug 20 07:38:00 2007

Over the last four days, I've been exploring how to convert physical Linux boxes into virtual machines. VMWare has a tool for doing P2V conversions, as they're called, but as far as I can tell it only works for Windows physical machines and for converting various flavors of virtual machines into others. I've had a Linux machine that I've used in my CS462 (Large Distributed Systems) class for years. The Linux distro has been updated over the years, but the box is an old 266MHz Pentium with 512Mb of RAM. Overall, it's done surprisingly well--a testament to the small
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VMWare Fusion Beta 3 Released

Fri Apr 6 14:15:00 2007

I downloaded the 3rd beta release of VMWare Fusion today and spent some time playing with it. Fusion is the desktop virtualization application from VMWare for OS X. You can download it here and try it out for yourself for free, it you like. I wrote up my thoughts about VMWare Fusion and posted them at Between the Lines, if you're interested.
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Virtual Appliances

Sat Mar 10 12:05:00 2007

I spent a little time today playing around with a virtual appliance (VA) from VirtualAppliances.net. They have LAMP, Tomcat, Cacti, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and HTTTP server virtual appliances that you can download and run inside a variety of virtualization environments, including VMWare and XEN. I downloaded the LAMP stack VA and it booted in VMWare Fusion on my MacBook Pro. The VA uses DHCP to get its network address (there's no option or static IP numbers at boot time) and the boot screen gives the relevant URLs for the admin console. There's no way to log in--you use the management
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Using VMWare Fusion: A First Look

Mon Mar 5 15:02:00 2007

Last Friday I wrote that VMWare had released the second beta of Fusion, their virtual desktop for OS X. Over the weekend I took a little time to play around with it and had a few observations. Note that this is not a formal review--don't take it as one. First, Fusion works well, as promised. No major hiccups to report. I was able to set up a Fedora Core 6 image with only a few issues. Here are some of my discoveries and impressions: Fedora isn't one of the "supported" operating systems. I mistakenly chose "Redhat Linux" thinking that
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Routing Around VMWare

Wed Jan 3 12:47:00 2007

Today Terry Wilcox, my grad students working on virtualization informed me that he had Xen installed and working on our virtualization testbed (two dell 6650's with 4 CPUs and 16Gb of RAM). Working means that he can transfer running instances from one box to the other. We have been doing a lot of performance studies of VMWare's ESX, but switched to Xen for the next part of Terry's research. The reason isn't that we wanted some infrastructural diversity, although that's not all bad. The reason is that we had reason to fear that VMWare might hinder the publication of
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VMWare ESX Performance Report

Wed Sep 6 10:55:00 2006

I've had a student, Terry Wilcox, working to understand the performance characteristics of VMWare's ESX virtualization monitor. Terry's finished his initial work and written up the tests and some conclusions. Overall, ESX scales quite linearly--that is each new virtual machine gets a fair share of the processor and other resources. There are some interesting conclusions: Single CPU virtual machines scale better than virtual machines using Virtual SMP. Hyper-Threading increases throughput if there are a large number of virtual CPUs, but makes no difference if the number of virtual CPUs is less than or equal to the number of physical
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Virtualization Testbed

Tue Jan 3 15:14:00 2006

Suppose you had a couple of quad processor boxes with 16Gb of RAM each attached to a 1Tb SAN and enough VMWare ESX licenses to do whatever you wanted on the platform. What would you do? We're wrapping up some initial VMWare performance studies on the boxes and I'm looking for ideas about what research projects to do with them next. I have a few ideas, but I'm curious if you have any.
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