VMW e.x.p on Fedora 16
Well, after getting dual boot to work with WIN8CP and Fedora 16, I decided to move to F16 as more of a permanent OS. I've spent the last few nights until about 4 or 5 am working on some of these things. So please excuse my poor thought process, havn't had too much sleep lately.
Reminder this is for VMware Workstation 8 Tech Preview NOT 8.0.2
Step 1:
Get hardware raid permanently mounted in /etc/fstab ... pretty easy, figure out what the name of the raid array is by going into the disk utilities app and add it to /etc/fstab with the normal defaults 0 0 settings.
Step 2:
Download and install nVidia Video drivers:
This took a few more steps. Right away the nvidia drivers setup requires you to kill your x server. Easy step, type 'init 3' and re run the setup. Next thing it asked me to do was disable the Nouveau driver, ran a quick google search on disabling Nouveau drivers in Fedora 16, instructions worked perfectly, rebooted, setup the 2nd monitor. Next step.
Step 3:
Download and install VMware Workstation 8 Tech Preview.
I ran into a few issues right away with the installation, not having the correct packages installed was the biggest issue. I ended up adding the development repo's for the new fedora 3.3.1.5 kernel and installing the necessary packages with it; then run a yum update, and reboot. After the reboot I was still getting errors that seem to progress along with the version of 8.0.2, I ended up having to install 8.0.2 first, run the patch for 8.0.2 thats available in the forums on the vmware site, and then upgrade 8.0.2 to e.x.p since the patch does not work for e.x.p. Note: I had to upgrade to e.x.p because of the hardware version and version of vmware tools that are installed on my vms. They would not boot unless I powered them on in my windows OS, downgraded the hardware level and vmware tools, and then tried to power them on in Fedora. The next issue I came across was, the 'Enter License Key" function in the GUI would not work, just click and nothing. After find this thread (http://communities.vmware.com/message/2029214#2029214) on the community site, a little light bulb went off in my head about the license file. So I tried to edit the license file with the S# of the e.x.p version and restart the vmware service. No luck. After a few hours of doing more google searching and trying different possibilities. In that folder you will find 3 different types of licenses, ws, ws.vl, ws.eval; which I can only assume are the different types of licenses available for purchase. After running a 'cat license-ws-90-e*-201202' I noticed that the license type for each file was different. Since e.x.p is available free to the general public, the Serial Number for the license can be found on the website where you can download VMW-TP, I assumed that it was a full version of the product. There are also 2 different versions of license files in that folder, what looks to be the version for 8.0.2, and the version for e.x.p. I copied the license-ws-90-e1-201202 file to the /etc/vmware/ directory, since that correlates to the type of license I needed. Then after running another cat on the original license file, I merely just edited the new license file with "Serial = 'XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX'", saved and restarted the VMware service. Tada!! You should now be able to start the VM, but may have a new issue, an error about the Kernel version being different then what is found. I simply rebooted the machine, and re-ran VMW, and it started to work.
Step 4: Get my sound/keyboard/mouse drivers installed
TBD
Hope this helps!
WIN8CP and VMware Workstation TP
Just finished installing the recently released VMware Workstation Tech Preview, on a WIN8CP VM running on ESXi5. Normal install no changes, I just installed the enhanced keyboard this go around, in case I needed to use it. I will be using the WIN8CP VM for RDP instead of going to our AD or Apps production servers. This way I can also start testing out vShield and some other things I would like to try and figure out the internals of. Maybe even spin up a secondary oS11 VM so that I can practice with rsync from home finally.
Also added a 100GB partition to the WIN8CP so I have some play room, I can always expand and give it another 100GB if needed.
Edit:
Ran into an issue installing TP over VMW8. Looks like the msi is missing from when I was cleaning up the SSD. Found a possible work around though, just waiting for the files to transfer. I'll update to whether or not it worked, and what I actually did.
Edit:
After completely searching through the registry and removing anything with the name 'vmware workstation' and tools-*-iso (and rebooted 3 times 
) I finally got the VMW-TP install to work, after I ran 8.0.2 first. Pretty satisfied right now as everything is up and running as I wanted. Updated my task scheduler so that it points to the new directory where VMW-TP is installed, and we should be back in business. Copying over the oS11.4 iso onto my WIN8-CP VM at work, should be able to start that up tomorrow and get replication underway. Also just realized that I could play with drag and drop a server from VMW to VS5 and back again after I have the VM up and running. Let's see where my imagination takes me!
Note: Tech Preview automatically comes with debuging turned on, since it's sort of a 'alpha' your just going to have ignore it.
TBCU.
VMware vCSA
Finally got vCSA up and running in the Lab; after getting some help on the VMware forums. Some great people over there, have to say, always willing to lend a hand.
Here's a link to the steps that ended up working correctly: http://jreypo.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/vcenter-server-appliance-part-1-configuration-and-deployment/ make sure that they are done in order, or your results may not work as intended.
My issue seemed to be from not configuring the hostname/network before I saved the database settings.
Also did a /facepalm when I realized I could have been reverting to snapshot instead of deleting from disk and redeploying. Won't be doing that again!
We should be getting some production customers soon for our cloud app, which means we are moving to a production environment all the sooner. Great news for the company!
Working on downloading and testing vShield out now, I want to see if it can simplify some of the networking tasks that we are going to have to do.
Linux
I'm really starting to like having a dev environment as well, I'm getting a chance to play with linux automation on a whole new level then I did before. My next idea is to figure out pgsql replication using rsync. Havn't done that one before and I think it'll be something that I will enjoy.
Upgrades!
Finally got to order the ram for my server @ work. Now get to max it out at 32GB (it's an older one); it's also the dev server so not really any need for a crazy server. Good side is that I can finally spin up more than 2 servers simultaneously and it not run slow. That should be in this week! Finally! Hopefully will be looking into ordering the Production environment hardware sometime soon as well, but that is more dependant on CRI than anything else. Keeping my fingers crossed that everything works! TBC.
Windows 8
Windows 8 was released yesterday, so got that installed at home and at work, both virtualized, so I will end up playing with that this weekend! Was kind of funny I installed it at lunch in 15 minutes, and then saw vExperts post blogs about steps to install it; didn't really think it was that complicated, lol. Oh well, welcome to another worthless windows OS. Don't really see the big deal about it off the bat, it looks like a mobile OS that was ported to a desktop. Will update more later.
VMware vSphere 5
Updated the dev environment from ESX 4 to ESXi 5, updated all the vmfs data stores, and created an OpenFiler NAS using iSCSI as a target in the dev environment. Great news, that means that we have another 1TB of storage available to us, and we won't have to worry about running out anytime soon. Also great because the iSCSI target can be used as an RSYNC target as well, so I can test backups with out having to spin up another AirWave server.
At this point I'm almost out of CPU on the host. Here we come prod environment!
zypper dup = dumb idea
So I decided to go ahead and try the dist upgrade for my vm this weekend.
Like an idiot I forgot to take a snapshot first.
Learned a bunch about how php5 functions though, and how to manually configure it. So that's something on the plus side.
SOPA and PIPA are BAD!
http://mashable.com/2012/01/17/sopa-dangerous-opinion/
http://mashable.com/2012/01/18/wikipedia-black/
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57360665-503544/sopa-pipa-what-you-need-to-know/
The CBS website has links to both of the bills if you care to read them.
Please DO NOT support his legislation!
Reporting
Now that I have had the AWMS server up for a few days, I actually have some data to play with when I'm trying to run a report; sent myself a custom report today, although it was kind of empty, it is good progress forward to getting the results that we want.
Also set up a custom crontab to email me the results of 'yum check-update' fairly easy process, but atleast I don't have to login to the AWMS everyday to check on OS patches now. It will automatically get emailed to me every 24 hours.
step 1: edit /etc/aliases
step 2: run 'newaliases'
step 3: crontab -e
add the following:
MAILTO=root
yum check-update 2>&1 | mail -s "Servername Update Check" root
This can be done to pretty much any service you have running, if you want daily reports.
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