Bill Campbell wrote:
On Wed, Feb 27, 2008, Les Mikesell wrote:
Ern jura wrote:
Does anyone out there have a comprehensive tutorial on installing VMware and successfully managing virtual machines with either xen or vmware?
VMware is pretty simple: download the server rpm, install it, run the vmware-config.pl setup script to set the options and install your (free) license key. Then run vmware locally or from some other machine to access the console where you can create and start the virtual machines. Once created, you can treat the virtual machines like they were separate physical boxes except that they contend for host resources (and once they are up on the network I prefer to connect directly to them with ssh, X, freenx, or vnc instead of using the VMware console. You'll want plenty of RAM on the host machine and if you run several VM's they will perform better if you can spread them over different disk drives.
I just started playing with VMware-server-1.0.5-80187 on a 64-bit CentOS 5 system system, and am having some issues with the hotkey switching. Running the vmware-server-console via an ssh connection from a PPC Mac Mini, it doesn't recognize the ctrl-alt sequences, which isn't totally surprising as I'm using a PS/2 Microsoft Natural keyboard on a KVM switch with a USB->PS/2 adapter. When I try running it directly on the CentOS system's console through the same KVM switch, it doesn't respond either.
I have installed SCO Openserver 5.0.6a on a virtual image, and that seems to be working OK (my primary object now with VMware is to have a fall-back when customer's OSR5 system's hardware goes south). I have had at least one situation where it didn't recognize the CTRL-RightButton sequence in an xterm running on the OSR5 image.
As I mentioned in the post above, I prefer to connect directly to the guests once their network is up instead of using the vmware console - and especially so for a guest OS that doesn't have a vmware-tools package. I only use the console long enough to create and configure the guest systems.