Core as a VM on a mac OSX server

[Domodude]

Hi all,

I decided to try LMCE again, after many things have evolved quite bit over the time that I was away. Virtually all machines in my house are now macs and I would like to run the core as a VMWare machine on my OSX Snow Leopard server. Regarding the IP addresses though, things seem a bit wrong at the moment.

• Am I correct that I have to make the VM my DHCP server? I have a bunch of fixed IP addresses (e.g. my SAN) already programmed in my current DHCP server, so this would be a bit of a pain. However, I am afraid that I have to switch. Is that correct or can I keep my current server by some miracle?
• Has anyone done this OSX thing before? I have some ideas on how to set the network types in VMWare (1 bridged, the other one also bridged or host only  ), but it's always better to use a tried and tested method than to figure it out yourself!
  

Best regards
Mark

[merkur2k]

i do not know of anyone that has made it work in vmware, but it has been known to work in virtualbox.
it needs to be the dhcp server if you want the network plug and play stuff to work and if you want to run media directors. which means you need at least two physical networks on the vm host as well.

[toppot]

i do not know of anyone that has made it work in vmware, but it has been known to work in virtualbox.
it needs to be the dhcp server if you want the network plug and play stuff to work and if you want to run media directors. which means you need at least two physical networks on the vm host as well.

I have installed - and working - both 8.10 and 10.04 in VMWare server 2.0.2 (think it is .0.2)... Working very smooth. I install with 1 bridged card (for external), and 1 host-only card (for internal). You can then deactivate the LMCE firewall... Then when everything is working and stable you can deactivate your current dhcp, and then also make the internal card bridged... It will of course mean changing your current fixed IP mappings - and that everything from the inside will be NATed trough LMCE..

This for me is not the optimal any more, I will soon install on iron, and then have dual internal networks, one for LMCE and one for the rest - and with the LMCE firewall off. But the dual network is not the primary reason for my changes, it is actually to support PCI cards (and USB 2.0, which is not on my current server - since it is old, but has 12 Gigs of RAM and runs "the rest").

-Tony

[Domodude]

Hi again,

Thanks for your replies. 

I did notice that the DHCP server is not strictly necessary, but a lot of things will stop working. So I think I'll bite the bullet and route all traffic through the LMCE VM. I am happy that my z-wave USB stick works fine, all I need now are a USB->RS232 converter and a USB video recorder device (Hauppauge HD?).

Of course, I'll have to get the local orbiter to work, so I can play movies on the core through LMCE. Not sure yet how to do that, since 1080p has not worked for me, so far.

Mark

[WhateverFits]

I use VMWare's vsphere (ESXi) and love it, especially for beta testing. Yes, either run dual networks or use the LMCE DHCP server. Either will be fine but pick one of those two options for the best results.

[Avner]

I use VMWare's vsphere (ESXi) and love it, especially for beta testing. Yes, either run dual networks or use the LMCE DHCP server. Either will be fine but pick one of those two options for the best results.

WhateverFits,
Do you know how well VMWare's vsphere will perform in context of LMCE compared to VMWarePlayer?
I'm trying VMWarePlayer. It works ok with the LMCE Kubuntu as an OS guest (I can access the KDE desktop, invoke the terminal and other Linux executables, etc... ) but have problems with the LMCE itself. The plug and play is executing Spawn scripts for devices that I do not have and the orbiter is non responsive (see http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php/topic,12387.0.html)
Do you think that VMWare's vsphere (ESXi) would help with this?

Thanks,
Avner

[mkbrown69]

Avner,

While I'm not "WhateverFits", I would recommend NOT using VMWare player.  Because it sits on top of an existing OS, there's a lot of overhead involved in trying to run LMCE that way.  ESXi would be a better fit, as it's a bare-metal hypervisor (a Type 1 hypervisor).  Much less overhead involved.

Personally, I'm running an existing Linux Server as a KVM virtual host.  I have two NICs on the physical box, bridged to separate physical and virtualized networks.  I have a br_ext, which is my existing production environment, and a br_int, which is the LMCE .80.0/24 network.  My LMCE test instance is a virtual with 2vCPU's and 1.7G of RAM.  LMCE owns the internal network on it's virtual eth1, bridged to br_int, and it is dual-homed (meaning that eth0 in LMCE is attached to br_ext, connected to my WAN router and the rest of world).  I have a wireless router on the external net, and a separate one on the internal net, letting me flip between the existing non-LMCE production network and my LMCE testing network.  As I complete some migration and Proof-of-concept activities, I'm then migrating services into the LMCE environment while not affecting my existing prod environment.  When I'm fully ready, I'll be able to cut-over to LMCE as the production environment with minimal downtime, as all the backend stuff will have been completed.  It's not at all obvious that I'm a SysAdmin by day, eh?   

Hopefully this gives you some food for thought.

/Mike

[WhateverFits]

I agree. VMWare Player is NOT an optimal way of running this. There is just too much overhead in the host to make it really run well. I have done that for testing purposes and loved it as a test however, the performance was abysmal. The performance of my core running on a bare metal virtual host is nearly that of a native install. The one drawback of using VMWare's VSphere is that the UI for managing it runs only under Windows. Ergh. If you do this, don't forget to configure and allocate your second NIC properly. That one bit me for a while.

[Avner]

Sorry if I'm derailing the discussion a bit off topic. I can start a new thread but I think my question relate to at least one part (the Core as VM)

The one drawback of using VMWare's VSphere is that the UI for managing it runs only under Windows.

So does this means that you install VMWare's VSphere on Windows?
From what I read, bare-metal hypervisor installs directly without Host OS below it. Is bare-metal hypervisor different from VMWare's VSphere?

In my case, I have:
1) A dedicated machine for LMCE as native host.
2) A second machine, Windows Vista that serves for general computer use (email, games for my daughters etc...)
Needless to say that the second (Windows) machine has more resources to satisfy the family needs (daughters complaining about speed)
With the performance differences and easy access to application (such as Word, email), I find it much easier to develop, customize my LMCE environment in a virtual machine on top of the Windows OS machine.

As I understand, with VMWare's VSphere / bare-metal hypervisor, I'll lose the native host Windows OS. It that correct?
I personally don't mind the low performance of LMCE in VMplayer as long as LMCE will evetually respond. I say this because I am planning to use the VM mainly to test settings, before transferring it to the dedicated LMCE machine (However, what I experience is that the Orbiter turns completely non responsive after a while).

Thanks,
Avner

[WhateverFits]

Negative. It is a bare-metal hypervisor exactly as you said. However, the management console is a Windows application. You will completely wipe out anything on the host system with VSphere. I use my dedicated machine to host multiple VMs on including my LMCE (both 10.04 and 8.10). The advantage of doing this over what you are doing is that when (if) I get my configuration correct, I just promote it to run all the time and deprecate my other images. When I screw up my config, I only have to back it out just to my latest snapshot and continue from there.

There is nothing wrong with using VMWare Player for testing. It will work just fine for that. I lost a hard drive and had to reinstall anyway so I chose to go to a bare-metal hypervisor rather than native OS. I'm glad I did.

[Randall]

Bare-metal hypervisors work fine if your hardware is well supported and you can wrap your head around the networking. I did this for a while running ESXi. It can also be a pain to get pci cards to pass-through properly to the OS in my experience. The requirements for a core machine are modest so you can get away with a pretty minimal computer by today's standards.

[Avner]

Thanks for the clarification.

I will keep the bare-metal hypervisor solution in mind - it sounds like a good way to manage multiple snapshots and with better performance.
In the meantime, I found a workaround to my problem using VMPlayer - ugly but it works for me (in http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php/topic,12387.0.html)
By the way, I am circumventing the limitation to back up multiple snapshots with VMPlayer relatively easily, by copying the entire vm directory to a different directory.

Avner