Archive for Virtualisation

Enable Automatic Start Up for Guest OS on VMware ESX 3.5

18 July, 2008 at 2:36 pm by · Filed under Design and Usability, Virtualisation

This one had me tearing my hair out. We needed to enable auto startup on some of our Virtual Machines on the VMware ESX server, but I couldn’t for the life of me work out how. After a stupid amount of Googling around, turning up nothing, I actually RTFM! Page 177-178 had the answers ;)

Here’s how to do it:

Launch the Virtual Infrastructure Client. If you don’t have it, just http:// to your VMware ESX host and grab it from the front page.

Go to the Configuration tab of your ESX Server, then click on Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown.

By default (I’m pretty sure) automatic startup is disabled. To enable it, click on “Properties…” on the far upper right of the window.

You’ll now see this window:

Check/Tick “Allow virtual machines to start and stop automatically with the system”.

Now, this is the bit where I nearly cried…

You know you want to “enable” your Guest OSes to automatically boot, but how? I tried clicking and dragging, right clicking for a context menu to enable “Automatic start up” and gave up.

Turns out, you need to click on the Guest OS you’d like to enable, and then click “Move Up” until it sits underneath the “Automatic startup” title. Argh!

I really hope this helps someone out! :)

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Force VMWare to Generate a new MAC Address

16 July, 2008 at 2:13 pm by · Filed under Troubleshooting, Virtualisation

How to force VMWare to regenerate a MAC address for a guest OS.

  1. Shut down the Guest OS.
  2. Open up the .vmx file.
  3. Delete the following lines (that begin with…): 
    ethernet0.addressType
uuid.location =
uuid.bios =
ethernet0.generatedAddress =
ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset =

     

  4. Boot up the Guest OS again, and it should generate new details in the vmx file (I’d check afterwards to be doubly sure).

 

The most common scenario for wanting to do this is if you’ve used a “template” Guest OS and copied it to multiple PCs, but accidentally clicked “I moved this Virtual Machine” rather than “I copied this Virtual Machine” when first booting the Guest OS in something like VMware Player.

If you tell VMware that the Guest OS was copied, it automatically generates new UUID info and MAC addresses. If you tell VMware that you moved the Guest OS, all unique identifiers are left alone (including the MAC address). By performing the steps above, you can get VMware to generate you some new, unique identifiers, and stop weirdness on your network ;)

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Dell PowerEdge 1950 III supports VMware ESX 3.5 (Update 1)

7 July, 2008 at 4:36 pm by · Filed under Hardware, Virtualisation

For anyone wondering if VMware ESX 3.5 will install on a Dell PowerEdge 1950 III, the answer is Yes. I just ran through a full install and everything looks great.

Screenshot below, showing system through VMware Infrastructure Client.

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Installing Fedora Core 6 on VMWare Workstation 5.5

25 March, 2007 at 2:24 pm by · Filed under Troubleshooting, Virtualisation

When installing Fedora Core 6 on my Windows VMware setup, it failed to find any disks to install on. The reason? I selected the Guest OS as “Red Hat Linux”, seeing as Fedora Core has direct lineaege from Red Hat. Anyway, it doesn’t work and fails to find a disk. To get around this, choose “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4″ or “Other Linux 2.6.x kernel” and it’ll find the Virtual SCSI disk perfectly.

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