theYinYeti Posted January 23, 2009 Report Share Posted January 23, 2009 (edited) Hi, I'm toying with VMWare 2 and it's currently driving me mad !!!!!!!!!!! It installed OK, I created the VM, OK. BUT how do I see the GUI of this damn thing???? Not the web one, that one's fine. With VMWare 1, starting the VM allowed me to SEE it booting. Now all seems to happen in memory and I can't find how to SEEEEEE the guest! I found my way to the vmrun command and tried this: [yves@sedentaire ~]$ /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmrun -T server -h https://localhost:8333/sdk -u yves -p xxxxxx start '[standard] VM/VM.vmx' Although I see things happening in the events list in the web GUI, still nothing REAL on screen! Even if I append 'gui' to the command above, as suggested by the help text. How does it work? Yves. [moved from Software by spinynorman] Edited January 25, 2009 by theYinYeti Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted January 24, 2009 Report Share Posted January 24, 2009 You have to log into the web interface, then click one of the tabs to view the console - which requires a plugin being installed into Firefox. Then once the plugin is installed, and browser restarted, log back into the web interface again, click the console tab and click inside the black console window and it will then open and you can view the machine. There's no vmware-console like there was with VMware Server 1.x Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted January 25, 2009 Author Report Share Posted January 25, 2009 Oh! So that is the answer! Thank you Ian! I find it really strange that the firefox plugin is not included in the VMWare download… or is it? After the RPM is installed, it says something about running …whatever….pl, a script that configures (almost) everything, and I did expect everything to be setup after that. Surely the Firefox' system-wide plugins-directory isn't that hard to find! Well, I did my experiments with VirtualBox after all. Quite neat IMHO. I was experimenting with booting a raw partition from a virtual machine, a bit like in this post. I followed “mesbalivernesâ€'s explanations and all went well. Not only does VirtualBox support the feature with a well-featured tool, but also, the resulting hard disk (vmdk) was immediately supported in the main GUI and working in the VM (and I did not have to tinker with lilo). (More over, VBox OSE seems to support USB now — I did not try —, and it now has a nice 3D support!) With VMWare on the other hand, such a hard disk has always been hand-crafted, and although the (also hand-crafted) machine description (vmx) was accepted by VMWare Server 1, the version 2 seems to reject the vmdk even though I did not write the vmx from the ground-up but instead carefully adapted the basic one (with no hard disk): even with the correct reference to the vmdk, and with the machine version equal to 4 (to match that of the vmdk), the GUI still shows the machine as having no hard disk… That's when I would have liked to see the machine booting, so I could see if the boot process matched the vmx (one HD), or matched the GUI (zero HD)… Now I have the solution, I suppose I'll take a look one coming day, if only to compare. Yves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted January 25, 2009 Report Share Posted January 25, 2009 What I like about VMware Server 2 is that there is a 64 bit version as well as the 32 bit version. VMware Server 1.x was always only 32 bit. The downside now with VMware Server 2 is you only have the web interface, and at times it can be frustrating. Slow, requiring numerous refreshes to get the options you're normally expecting to see, and so on. However, it's not enough for me to switch from this to VirtualBox because of the fact that VirtualBox requires too much buggering around with to get bridged networking to work properly. If you're only going to use your machines for accessing the internet, and you don't actually want to connect to the machines externally, then NAT is enough which works flawlessly by default. But I like to connect to my machines from either my laptop (host of the vm's) or from other machines on the network. Maybe KVM would be better, but I haven't spent a lot of time on this, but it looks promising and doesn't require as much buggering about with the networking. The same with xen, although I wouldn't use Windows guests under xen because there too slow. KVM is good for this. If I'm only using Linux hosts, then it's xen for the time being. If I have spare hardware, then VMware ESXi is really cool and free, and faster than VMware Server 2. Only you need a Windows machine for the VMware VI Console since a Linux one doesn't exist yet - but there should be one sometime in the near future. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted January 25, 2009 Author Report Share Posted January 25, 2009 (edited) Well, it seems KVM is one more thing I'll want to investigate :) Anyway, it's nothing that serious: I don't even plan to install much software on the “virtual†machine, and it'll barely have network access. It's more of a test about what cannot be done and what can, and then with what performances. I'm always very curious about things, and sometimes too much for my own good maybe :lol: Yves. Edited January 25, 2009 by theYinYeti Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted January 26, 2009 Report Share Posted January 26, 2009 There is para-virtualisation in VMware Server 2, so once you create the machine, go to Configure VM and then the advanced tab, and you can enable the VMI para-virtualisation option which will make the machine faster. This of course then means you need to install a version of Linux with a 2.6.21.x kernel or later for the VMI support if I remember correctly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ffi Posted January 26, 2009 Report Share Posted January 26, 2009 I find it really strange that the firefox plugin is not included in the VMWare download… or is it? After the RPM is installed, it says something about running …whatever….pl, a script that configures (almost) everything, and I did expect everything to be setup after that. Surely the Firefox' system-wide plugins-directory isn't that hard to find! the plugin gets installed once you enter the correct web address but vmware has gotten such a pain to install and maintain, I prefer virtualbox iirc you had to run ff as root once to set everythinh up... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted January 26, 2009 Report Share Posted January 26, 2009 Nope, definitely didn't require running Firefox as root. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ffi Posted January 26, 2009 Report Share Posted January 26, 2009 you could be right not in mdv, I guess that was ubuntu because you need to log in as user:root and root password but root isn't set up in ubuntu Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted January 26, 2009 Report Share Posted January 26, 2009 I use Ubuntu also and it's not the same there either :) What happened was that you run vmware-config.pl, and towards the end you are asked for a user to set as the Super Administrator, which is defaulted to root - so it could be this you mean. And if you set this to root, it means then when you use the web interface, you have to login as root. As you say, if no root password is set, you'd have a problem. At this point in the script, I specify my own username instead of root, then there is absolutely no requirement to use root with VMware Server 2. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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