• VMWare

Using VMWare virtual machines for sysadmin

Using VMWare Server

On Ubuntu Dapper:

1. install base server
2. install openssh-server
3. install build-essential
4. install xinetd, librender1, libxtst6
5. install vmware server, configure
6. add vmware-server console to client machines
7. add virtual machines and enjoy

General

Basically, we are exploring the use of VMWare virtual machines for the following tasks:

• creating a base Linux server image (now Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 LTS)
• creating a base Ubuntu desktop image
• creating a base WinXP image

The advantage of virtual machines is that all of the base images can be created and updated on the sysadmin's desktop machine, and then saved using partimage. When needed they can then be restored to the correct hardware and the final hardware and task specific tweaks applied. This can save the considerable time required for building a Gentoo server or updating/patching a WinXP station. In the case of the Gentoo server, this will require building for a least common denominator (i686?) so some optimizations will be lost.

VMWare notes

These mainly apply to Gentoo:

• the SCSI drive emulated is a Fusion MPT, so Fusion MPT support must be compiled into kernel
• the network driver is an AMD PCnet32, which also should be compiled into the kernel or at least added as a module

Future directions

It should be possible to create VMWare images which replicate all of our servers. Then temporary failover service could be supplied by running the VMWare image on a separate machine.