Learn about Linux
Download Linux
Get Linux helpSpecial Offers
Feature
Desktop Virtualization with VMware Player and Workstation
Share
Print
CommentsPlaying with distributions
VMware Player is available as a free download for both Windows and Linux, and Ubuntu users on x86 and AMD64 machines can even install VMware Player from the Ubuntu repositories.
VMware Player can't make VMs on its own, but you can find virtual appliances on VMware's Virtual Appliance Marketplace. Once you have the player up and running, download an image from the marketplace and point it an image of a pre-configured virtual machine.
If you are new to Linux, or haven't tried it at all, get an appliance for a Linux distribution and off you go. It not only saves on installation time, but also enables you to run a complete operating system inside a little window. How cool is that?
| |
| New options in VMware Workstation 6 beta - click to view |
And don't assume the appliances are only for fun. Many are tuned and purpose built for specific tasks. The LAMP appliance, for instance, gives you a pre-configured Linux, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, PHP, Python, and Perl setup, along with several Web-based configuration tools, all in one neat ready-to-use appliance. No cumbersome setup or configuration required, just download, uncompress and run it in VMware Player. Your very own Web-server, fully configurable through a Web-browser, up and running on your intranet in no time.
But VMware Player can only run pre-built virtual machines. It cannot create its own. Or can it? This article on NewsForge details the procedure of tweaking a pre-built image to own your requirements. Apart from that several freeware tools and Web sites, like EasyVMX and rPath, can create custom virtual machines and custom appliances for you.
Create your own virtual infrastructure
If you don't feel like going the hard way to image creation with VMware Player, VMware Workstation makes managing and creating virtual machines child's play. It's available for both Linux and Windows as a 30-day free trial, after which you need to shell out (USD) $189. Installation on either platform is just a matter of clicks and is well-documented.
You get a plethora of options to custom-cook your virtual machine. This is made easy by the New Virtual Machine Wizard. While putting together your virtual machine, you also get the option to use your network card with the same IP address as the host machine through NAT.
Since most distributions are available as ISO images, VMware Workstation can fool your virtual machines into reading these as CD-ROM disks. This saves the time and effort required to transfer the images on to physical media. So you can download, install and run, a 64-bit edition of FreeBSD available as a DVD image on a 10 GB IDE disk inside a virtual machine residing on your Pentium 4 host (with IVT support) with a SATA hard disk and no functional optical drives running Windows. You can easily change the configuration of the virtual machines by adding or removing the virtual hardware at any time, when the virtual machine isn't running.
VMware Workstation keeps all virtual machines in neatly-organized folders, which can be backed up on DVDs or moved to another host machine running on a different operating system.
|
| |
| VM hardware dialog in VM Workstation 6 beta - click to view |
But there's more to VMware Workstation than creating fancy hardware. One feature I love is its ability to pause running virtual machines. Pressing the "pause" button will suspend the running machine in its current state, which can later be resumed. If you'd rather save the state of the running virtual machine repeatedly, use the snapshot feature. A snapshot saves the content of all the disks and memory of the virtual machine and its settings.
VMware workstation's ability to group together several virtual machines into "teams" to setup a virtual lab is also impressive. You can use this setup to test and demonstrate various network software before deploying them on the actual network.
For security purposes, the team members can be made to communicate in a private network completely independent of the host computer's network. The "New Team Wizard" guides you through the process of creating the environment under which the team operates.
Beta be good
During the edit cycle of this article, VMware released a beta version of the VMware Workstation 6.0. VMware Workstation 6.0 beta packs a lot of improvements over the 5.5.3 version I tinkered with above. It supports several new operating systems including 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, Ubuntu 6.10, Mandriva 2007, and several others as both hosts and guests.
On the hardware department, Workstation 6.0 breaks the 4GB total RAM barrier for all VMs combined. The amount of virtual RAM available to all VMs is limited only by the amount of physical RAM on the host. Individual VMs can now grab up to 8GB of virtual RAM.
|
| |
| Virtual Machine hardware converter - click to view |
If you like to run individual VMs over multiple monitors or span a guest across several monitors, you can do so with this version. Best of all, this can be done even on hosts that have a single monitor. This is useful if you later plan on migrating this VM to a different host with several monitors. You can also specify what screen resolution to use and how much video memory to allocate per monitor.
Also, if you have USB 2.0 hardware, you'll be able to transfer data at the faster 2.0 supported rates. If you run VMware on a laptop, your guest OS will now be aware of the host machine's battery status.
Best of all, you get a wizard to easily upgrade your existing VMs to the new hardware specs of 6.0. The "Convert Hardware Wizard" will assist in upgrading or downgrading VM hardware between Workstation version 4, 5, and 6. If you decide to downgrade, the wizard also displays a list of Workstation 6.0 features that are not available for that version.
Another nifty new feature is the VMs ability to act as a VNC server. All it requires is a click to allow running the VM in the background, and a port number to allow VNC connections from. When you try to exit Workstation with a running VM, it prompts you to let it run the VM in the background. Then the VM can be reached over VNC, using one of the many freely available VNC clients -- at least in theory. All of my attempts to connect via VNC failed, but this is only a beta version.
The release also boasts enhanced file sharing functionality. It's easier to drag-and-drop files and copy-and-paste text between Windows, Linux, and Solaris hosts and guests. The beta also has some Windows-only features, like mapping a virtual disk to a drive letter in the Windows host, which can now be done with only a couple of mouse clicks. Workstation 6.0 also packs an "Importer Wizard" that can convert a physical Windows machine into a virtual machine. It can also convert virtual machines or system images from Microsoft's Virtual PC and Server, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery, and Norton Ghost images into VMware VMs.
Programmers who want to use VMware to test programs will appreciate the new Workstation IDE plug-ins. These provide a configurable interface between the VMs and programming environments like Eclipse and Visual Studio, to set up the various parameters for executing programs in virtual machines -- directly from the IDE. The release also features the upgraded VIX 2.0 API that allows you to write scripts to automate virtual machine operations.
If you're planning to use VMware Workstation, I'd advise you to download the freely available 6.0-beta. The detailed Workstation 6.0-beta User Guide, will help you find your way around common tasks and new features. Since this is a beta release, VMware has enabled the DEBUG option for additional logging and error checking, which hampers performance. On my dual-core system with 2GB RAM the difference in performance, between versions 5.5.3 and 6.0 beta, was negligible.
Conclusion
Both VMware packages are easy to install on Windows or Linux. They can save you time dual-booting between operating systems, and help utilize the full potential of your desktop. VMware software has a similar interface on all of the host OSes, which simplifies managing virtual machines. VMware Workstation is also loaded with wizards to guide you to your objective.
Both VMware products are amazing pieces of software. If you can make do with the downloadable appliances, or are not afraid to fire up your text editor to customize your virtual machine's configuration, the free-as-in-beer VMware Player should serve you well. Despite the name, VMware Server is also an option. But if you'd rather have the ability to customize and manage several machines, to test and demo network software or run secure machines, evaluate the not-so-expensive VMware Workstation.
On an adequately equipped host (mine is a 1.86 GHz dual-core processor with 2 GB of RAM), you will be surprised at the speed of the guest OS running on virtualized hardware. With so many VM appliances available for download, I'd recommend you start your virtualization experiment with VMware Player.
Comments
on Desktop Virtualization with VMware Player and WorkstationNote: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
Also Virtual Server is free as well from VMWare and it works very similar to the Workstation on a local machine. At least as a trial run the workstation that is coming out shortly is going to have features that the virtual server doesn't like dual monitor use and faster optimizations as well as debug capabilities.
2a - Most servers operate at less than full compacity. The CPU may peak at 75% from time to time. A heavy load may fill 80% of ram or less on occasion. The idea is to make efficient use of the hardware, resources should be fully consumed (leveraged as they like to say). If one OS on the hardware does not use full resources then put two OS on the hardware. Then the average use of the hardware is higher regardless of which virtual server usage is heavy or light.
Consider it this way, if you have to pay a fee to have a desk in your office but the person who works at the desk is out of the office half the time. Half your fee is going to waste. If two people sit at the desk on either side of it then the resource is being used even if one of them is out of the office.
I would argue that this is what blade servers are for.
You buy and use only what you need.
Don't get me wrong, I dream of the day I can afford to put a rack in my closet at home and start filling it with mountable servers but I'd also be looking at using Blades to host Virtualization. End result; small form factor physical boxes (1 rack of Blades = a room of full tower boxes lined up beside each other after all) being fully utilized by multiple VM.
"2-Virtualization isn't magically going to give you an increase past what the hardware can provide. "
Most of your servers e-mail, voip, ftp, crm, etc. are on individual machines and most of them are not really taxed, Voip driven Call center maybe an exception. Virtualization allows you to combine multiple systems together on one machine. While yes your individual systems will not be better in terms of speed and processing but most of what sane pro-virtualization enthusiasts are saying is combine these systems with little consumption together and use your money where it is needed. If you do heavy web-server traffic you probably shouldn't use virtualization exclusively for that system (Parallel VM's Maybe). But you may use your e-mail server that you combined with your ftp server to do a backup of both or something like that. You have surplus machines now you decide what to do with them.
If your hardware is being underused, you want to combine little systems (email isn't that big or hard a workload) into one hardware box to better use the hardware and reduce costs. Virtualization.
If your hardware is being overtaxed, you want to break it up into a cluster putting that heavy workload against mutliple systems.
Mind you, the snapshot migration offered by Virtualization is very nice. Just take the VM file and copy it to a new machine regardless of hardware differences since the VM only cares about it's vitual environment.
There is also the scenerio of using a cluster to host virtual machines being that a cluster is simply a single large machine made up of the collective of nodes. The other side to that would be building a cluster of VM on a single physical machine but I can't see there being any benifit to that at all outside of learning how to setup a cluster.
The end of the article suggests that the free VMWare Serevr product cannot run, customize and manage more than one machine. Is this the case and if so, why?
Finally, all of this series of articles breathlessly describe how wonderful each of these virtualization packages is and how well it runs various operating systems. But, when you get right down to it, no one runs OSes for the OS's sake. Rather they run an OS in order to run applications. But, none of the articles mention compatibility issues with OSes or applications.
Which applications work well and which applications have problems with these various virtualization packages and guest OS combinations?
Re: Vmware Server one machine: bullshit. I have a pool of 12 servers running on the same VMware Server.
Re: Application compat: nobody talks about it because there is nothing to talk about. Applications run flawlessly (that is, unless they are games<nobr> <wbr></nobr>;-)
Unless you are a gamer, 99.9% of applications work perfectly. For normal work use (datacenters, servers, etc.), virtualization is THE thing.
"But, none of the articles mention compatibility issues with OSes or applications."
Actually, I do but I also collect OS like some people collect baseball cards. Some of my VM are to explore new OS, some to run OS dependent applications, some to review OS for future family machines.
Good point - also Wireless separations needed.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on January 12, 2007 01:16 AMHost should not be seen by the Guest at all for internet purposes (for running HoneyPots, or just keeping bad stuff away from the Host file system period, etc).
And to run a Wireless NIC you need to keep it somehow apart as well... as it is even exposed to other security risks.
Re:Good point - also Wireless separations needed.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on January 12, 2007 03:45 AMMy VM each apear as seporate entities on the network eventhough they are all routed through the same physical hosts network card. That's based on direct bridging under VMware rather than NAT routing. (host Mandriva & Guests Windows, Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu, OLPC OS)
I've also seen VMware on a notebook running through Wifi and apearing to be multiple seporate entities on the network. The setup was VMware with network bridging. (host WindowsXP & Guests WindowsXP)
Not sure if that helps any.
Does this ability to share resources between VM guests and hosts not negate that security? What are the implications of a virtual machine being compromised when the separation of the VMs is itself compromised by the VMWare host connecting them?
See above "good point", I posted to wrong parent.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on January 12, 2007 01:20 AMThanks in advance.
If your heart is set on CentOS, confirm what kernel version it is using then make sure you pick the "other Linux" with correct kernel version.
WinXP and the type of physical hard drive have no bearing on the virtual reality creted inside VMware so it's more likely an issue with the CentOS kernel not playing nice with the choice of VM you've created.
Xen's graphic module is not yet implemented I don't believe so Xen remains better suited to hosting servers hit through the network rather than multiple OS hit through a mouse and keyboard on a workstation.
On cost; Xen at 0$ per license vs VMware Server at 0$ per license. I'm not seeing where Xen is cheaper.
The first thing I did when I got VMware linux/win32 versions was test the same VM (same physical file on a shared partition even) under VMware server running on both Linux and Windows. Guest OS run better under Linux hosts than under Windows host. It wasn't unexpected being that *nix is build for efficient use of resources and Windows is built for pretty apearances and ease of use.
There is not a huge performance hit with VMware since it's specifically developed for minimal reduction of performance from any guest OS.
Since you the workstations are used for heavy video editing, your primary function for the machine requires maximum processing and interaction with the hardware. Like video games, this is one area where you want to minimize the layers between hardware and editing application; you may want to stick to a native OS install on the video editing workstations.
Any system using applications that don't require direct hardware access or specialized hardware (gaming being an activity requiring direct hardware access and specialized GPU hardwaer) should function perfectly under a VM; I'd even test the video editing just to know what kind of hit you would potentially take from virtualizing the workstation.
The bigger question may be; Why are you installing an OS on the workstation just to support the VMware client you need to reach through the network and connect to a remote desktop (Guest OS on the VMserver). You may get more performance from finding *nix based video editing software (it's a bit of an area currently lacking but still) to make better use of the existing hardware.
Virtualization is great and opens up a ton of things you can do but like anything, it shouldn't be a solution looking for a problem, it should be a solution to an existing problem. Combining servers into one physical box for efficiency and security makes perfect sence but using it just to host remote desktops may be more of a solution where there is no problem in the first place.
The main issue is that doing the video editing on Linux is not an option for the client - even though he does know Linux is a better option than Windows for reliability and security. He said so explicitly. But his concern is finding technicians who can use Linux video editing software. He probably also isn't that familiar with what is available on Linux for top of the line video editing and conversion. So he's stuck using Adobe and other vendors products at this time.
One of the issues with the video editing in this case that DOES require heavy hardware is the fact that these video files can be really huge - up to a hundred gigabytes or more. The client uses GRAID Firewire drives to maximize the speed. One of my concerns was a hard disk I/O bottleneck (and whether Firewire is supported by the VM - something I'll check out today - I know USB is a recent addition), although I doubt that will actually prove to be an issue.
However, since this is a media conversion company, specialized hardware might also be an issue. They capture media from any source for conversion to digital media.
The main purpose behind my considering virtualizing Windows was the problems of running a remote management package on XP Home - it just isn't feasible given XP Home's lack of proper networking (either authenticating as Guest or having to muck around with the permissions and related matters to get some sort of remote Administrator access needed for the remote management software).
However, I've just thought of a better way - virtualize the application. I can install a VMware Server, build a Linux VM, install the remote management software and run it from the VM. One of the Linux remote management packages actually comes packaged as a VM in just this manner. The hit on the native host should be very minimal, so running the remote management package in a Linux VM shouldn't impact the video editing going on in the native Windows host.
As a bonus, it's also a way to get around the limitations in using rdiff-backup under Cygwin on Windows to implement a backup scheme for these huge video files. Instead, run a Linux VM with Fedora Core 5 or above and use the patched librsync library that FC5 rdiff-backup uses to handle files larger than 4GB. Rdiff-backup on other platforms such as Cygwin is limited to 4GB files unless patched with the FC5 patch.
Thanks again for the response. I can see that virtualization provides a solution for many IT problems if one gets creative.
Unfortunately, the ideal solutions are upgrading to winXP Pro or Mac being that it's a media production company. In the proprietary world, Adobe are the people for media editing and currently, that's just how it is.
As for efficiency, your Linux guest VM or any guest OS will run better under a *nix hosted system not just Windows guest OS. This is between the host OS and VMware server; Linux is built to be efficient where Windows is built to be pretty, at the expense of efficient. Each have there uses but efficiency is squarely in the relm of Unix/Linux.
For me, it's Games and the ATI TV-Tuner that force me to keep a Windows dualboot. Neither activity works inside the virtualized hardware of VMware. In the same way, your video editors are likely to suffer since they won't make full use of the GPU thinking it's simply an average video card.
Good that it gave you some inspiration though. Imagination goes a long way in tech. Using an application is nothing compared to finding a new way to use an application providing functions it wasn't originally designed for.
However, the client is doing heavy video editing and video conversion and runs stuff like Adobe Encore and Adobe Premiere and other high-end video stuff.
I have heard that VMware Server and Player and other virtualization programs like Microsoft's take way too much of a performance hit to do video editing on them. Extensive searching on Google has not yielded much precise information on just bad the hit is.
The client's machines are fairly powerful (2.5GHz and up with 1-2GB RAM) late model machines with Firewire external drives.
Could virtualization on top of Linux be used in this situation?
Flip side.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on January 11, 2007 09:45 AM1-I see this as putting all your eggs in one basket.
2-Virtualization isn't magically going to give you an increase past what the hardware can provide.
#