A geek with a budget.  That can be frustrating.  New geek toys aren’t cheap and old geek toys aren’t worth much.  Welcome to my life :) .  I am not complaining, I have an EXTREMELY understanding, wonderful and patient wife who tolerates my geek needs on a daily basis — I am so lucky as to have gotten a girl that tolerates me and my hobbies.  But I diverge.  Back to a geek on a budget….

I recently have had a rough couple of months with my servers — ever since Christmas they have seemingly had one problem after another.  If it was the package manager self-destructing, it was the file system going corrupt– it it was corrupt file systems it was my PBX going haywire and if it wasn’t the PBX then it was hard drives failing.  (Hence the spotty website service as of late…)  All in all it has honestly worn me down to a thin frazzle!!!  It was a full time job to get everything straightened out again and back in a smoothly running order ** KNOCK ON WOOD!!! **  Before I began the arduous task of piecing my infrastructure back together a fellow geek-friend posed the question “As long as you are starting over, why not use VMWare?  It is easier to backup, creates less opportunities for downtime and allows you to upgrade or test new server setups without affecting any of your other services.”   . . . . and then the light clicked on! DOH!  Where was VMWare two months ago to help prevent this type of thing from happening!  Needless to say I understood the wisdom in my fellow geek’s advice (it has nothing to do with the fact that he is a geek demi-god and that he is my geek hero) and adjusted my recovery plans to implement VMWare on my servers.

As a quick note, for those of you who aren’t familiar with VMWare I suggest you check a few links here, here.  To sum all that up, it is the ability to have two logical (virtual) computers on one physical computer.  So a computer within a computer :) .  aka the whole more for less type of thing — perfect for a nerd on a budget!

Lets face the truth folks, unless you are running a high load web server or an intensive database ge0logical database more than likely your current server(s) has a lot of unused resources most of the time — as was the case in my old infrastructure.  Sure I had a lot of different services running (email, ftp, print server, samba, virtual web servers, media server etc) but most of the time the server load was minimal because these services were only being used by a handful of people.  My PBX hardly used enough resources to justify turning the PC on (credit to the awesome dev team at nerdvittles.com).  So the more I thought about it, the more sense it made and the more I realized (like I always do) that I probably should have been doing this all along!!  In all honesty I was pretty pumped to get this project underway, not only because it meant that I could finally get my servers back online, but I was also excited to see how it all looked / worked once the dust settled.  And so the journey began..

Anyone who reads this site knows that I am huge ubuntu fan boy, so of course I used the latest version of ubuntu server as the host machines OS — please note that I tried both 32 and 64 bit and I had a lot of problems with 64 bit — I would recommend you stick with 32 bit for the time being.  Once I got Ubuntu installed, updated and configured the way I wanted I set my sights on VMWare.  Some of VMWare’s products are free (there is that budget concern again!) just head over to vmware.com and register an account, once you’ve got your account setup, just download the latest vmware server (v2.0 at time of this writing) and make sure you store you registration key in a safe place, you will need that in order to actually activate vmware.  I then found an excellent tutorial by the guys at howtoforge.com that you can reference here and merrily went along my way to getting VMWare up and running.

Here are a few tips ‘n tricks I learned along the way:

1 – VMWare is free — and like most things you get what you pay or — so don’t expect flawless performance, or unbuggy software.  VMWare can be very frustrating as it doesn’t play nicely with the Ubuntu kernel for some reason.  It appears to be connected the network bridging module.  But good luck in trying to stop VMWare services once you’ve configured a few servers.

2 – Everyone’s networking needs are different — for me, the “bridged” network option is what I wanted.  This allows the virtual machines to be seen and interact on the LAN just like another physically connected device.  This is the easiest and most natural way to give connectivity to your vms.

3 – If you want to have virtual machines span different vlans be prepared to plug-in a second NIC.  I know it is technically possible to configure multiple vlans with a single NIC in Linux, however I believe in simplicity wherever possible so just spend the $10 and save yourself the hassle.

4 – Make sure you plan your virtual hard drive sizes appropriately BEFORE you configure and setup your server.  I know they say you can re-size them after the fact, but I wouldn’t recommend it.  I attempted to do that and all I ended up with is a corrupt file system and a server that hadn’t gone through the proper backups yet (aka I lost some stuff :( !!!! )  It is always better to be a bit generous with your disk space then too tight-fisted.

5 – Install vmware tools!  It is an absolute necessity to take advantage of VMWares full capabilities.  There are tons of tutorials on how to accomplish this, just Google them.  It is very easy.

6 – Configure your virtual machine’s power settings so that they turn on and off with the guest machine (or however you prefer them to be configured).  If you fail to do this, your vms will not turn back on after a reboot!

7 – Every time your Linux kernel updates you have to reconfigure/recompile vmware — in Ubuntu it is fairly simple, just su to root and then issue the command ./vmware-config.pl

8 -  Firefox and vmware’s https:// log on page do not play nice together.  Save yourself the time and just use IE.  I know, I am not a big fan of IE either, but it is easier than dealing with buggy software.

9 – Sometimes your keyboard will not interact right with the vmware console, don’t panic, there are small patches that are available (specific to the host machine’s OS) so just spend a few minutes on Google and you can easily correct the issue.

10 – Depending on your file system partitions (I am using LVM and have a LV dedicated to my vms) you will want to specify “noatime” on the partition’s mount options — this will dramatically improve VMWare’s performance!

Well those are my few learnings thus far — all in all, in spite of the quirks that VMWare has, I would still say it is one of the better virtualization software packages available — not to mention it is FREEEEEE!!!  Please feel free to share any learnings or pop any questions below!