Andreas' Adventures

Very often when you are busy with VMWare, you need an extra disk. Now creating the disk can happen while the VM Linux guest is active. However you don't see the disk immediately. A reboot will help obviously, but I found a nice script on http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ that will show the new SCSI device, so that you can continue and add the disk without a reboot. Just search for the rescan-scsi-bus.sh script. It is on my VMWare Server now and will go directly to each new Linux guest from now on. Any possibility to prevent a reboot is welcome ;-)

Today I decided to abandon Oracle VM and move back to VMWare. A while ago I bought my old 4GB laptop from my company, when I was given a new one. I added a 1TB disk and installed Oracle VM 2.2 on it. There are some quirks with Oracle VM when it comes to support low end systems. First of all the system is memory bound quite fast. See an earlier post of me (http://achatzia.blogspot.com/2010/05/oracle-vm-memory-issue.html) to see how Oracle VM treats it memory. The second main issue is the problem with external USB2.0 devices. I ended up rebooting an image quite often as the SCSI drive was declared dead. I worked with VMWare since about 6 years, and only had lost one image - a colleague disconnected my external drive which resulted in a corrupt Oracle database. With Oracle VM I never had that stability. So for me it is good-bye OVM, and welcome back VMWare Server. Obviously the VMWare Server will run on a Linux host with Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5 .

Although I am busy moving to Oracle VM I needed to access one of my systems on VMWare on my laptop which I had not used for a while. The console of VMWare did not load. Ok - I though his might be due to some networks which I had disabled on Windows. Enabled them - no result. Checking the VMWare services I found out that the VMWare Host Agent was not running. So I restarted it. Crashed again. Obviously the next step is to check the Windows event viewer. To my surprise the System Log could not be displayed. Needless to say I had to fix this first. Clear the Log typically solves this and I was lucky this time. Back to the VMWare Host Agent. Started it agian - still crashes. I found the following error: The VMware Host Agent service terminated with service-specific error 4294967295 (0xFFFFFFFF). Checking the VMWare log. Log for VMware Server, pid=7444, version=2.0.2, build=build-203138, option=Release, section=2 [2010-04-24 12:20:34.264 'App' 2600 info] Current working directory: C...

I am using VMWare a lot for my Oracle activites. To be specific I use the VMWare Server. Now one of the missing features of the VMWare Server is that the drag and drop of files does not work. Typically with a Linux I use WinSCP from my Windows Vista host. With a Windows guest I often use the feature of the Remote Desktop to connect my local drive. Another possibility exists, although it is a little awkward and almost cumbersome if you need to transport a lot of files. In the VMWare Server a utility exists which will copy a file into the guest OS. This utility is called vmrun and it works as follows. Go to the directory where the file that you want to copy is located. Then execute the vmrun command with the following switches: -T server -h https://yourVMWareServerName:port/sdk (typically the port is 8333) -u username_of_the_vmware_server -p password_of_the_vmware_server -gu username_of_the_vmware_guest -gp password_of_the_vmware_guest copyFileFromHostToGuest “VMWare Configuration File” ...

Lately I ran into a strange problem. I switched on my Wireless Network on my laptop only to find out that every time it receives a hostname localdomain and an IP address of 192.168.2.174 . Of course I blamed Windows as this is often the problem. However I found out that the problem is the DHCP Server of the VMWare Server. This seems to assign DHCP leases not only for the networks towards the Virtual Machines but also to the host as well. The only remedy is to shutdown the Windows service of the VMWare DHCP Server when requesting a new IP address.