VMWare produce various pieces of software that allows you to run a virtual machine and in the case of VMWare Workstation for example, this allows you to run Windows inside a Linux Box or the other way around. IN effect then it allows many different operating systems to run without you have to reformat your machine every time. At the other end of the scale is VMWare vSphere Hypervisor ESXi – this is a bare metal (i.e. wipes your hard drive) installation and allows many virtual machines to run at the same time on a headerless (no monitor) box – often servers.  I thought I would take an existing desktop machine and see how this ran – let is begin my journey into ESXi.

The Hardware

The first piece of the puzzle is the hardware to run it on, in this instance I choose a ACER Aspire E700 Desktop machine, this has 5 GIG Ram, Core 2 Duo 1.86Ghz CPU and a 250GIG HD. Now this machine had a broken Network port on the motherboard and I had bought a TP-Link Gigabit PCI Card, which worked 100% fine in Windows. I had removed the GeForce 7600GT and used the on-board graphics card instead which meant the system was now whisper quiet.

Getting the Image

The first thing you need to do is grab the ISO, I headed to the main page and finally managed to download one of the many ISO’s on offer which I burnt onto CD. I tried the VMWare Go from a different machine, this involves booting the donor machine into Windows 7 and following the guide from another machine. This failed at the end, it complained about Firewalls and such but gave me a different link to download the client install.

Booting the CD

After writing the CD Image, I booted the machine and followed the guide, I was impressed that it knew what my Machine was (Acer Aspire E700) and once I accepted the Licence, it failed with an error and dropped to the command line – vmkctl.HostCtlException Unable to load module /usr/lib/vmware/vkmod/vmfs3: Failure

At this stage I was lost, maybe if I left it alone it might continue? Of course it never did and I went about searching on google. After some false information about setting option in the BIOS for the CPU and it was an issue with PATA or SATA, I finally got the answer I was looking for – the NETWORK CARD was at fault, seems ESXi Does not like the chipset that the TP-Link uses (RTL8169SC). I also heard that Broadcom are a problem and this is worrying.

Fixing the Issue

I still had the Intel Server Gigabit Network card which only works if you recall on a Server OS or Linux but not a desktop OS such as Windows XP or 7. I swapped them around and soon I had passed the Licence Screen and was on my way to installing the server onto the 250GIG HD. After a Reboot, I was presented with a simple screen showing me the IP Address to download the client and such.

Grabbing the client

On another machine, I pulled up a web browser and placed the IP address of the server and got the following screen:

From here I could download the vSphere Client and do other tasks as shown. Once the Client is installed, you get to manage the server from whatever machine you need to.

Converting existing Virtual Machines

As I already have VMWare Workstation with a handful of virtual machines, I wanted to convert these across to save remaking them. I Grabbed vmware vCenter Convertor and followed the process of picking the files and letting it go through the process. At the end I had the same virtual machines running on the standalone box as I did on my client machine.

Server Farms

At work we use the commercial version of this and instead of having one server per task, we have instead bought a high end server which comes with 4 x 6 Core Intel Xeon cpu’s silly amounts of Ram and harddrive space and run as many virtual machines as required. This not only stops us having to run rack after rack of servers but makes it easy to deploy another server without having to look at actual hardware.

Netbooks are often seen as not only been very portable but lasting longer then the equivalent laptop and one of the reasons I bought one all them years ago was to save me from having to carry out a normal sized laptop which never seen to last the stated life span on battery. Recently I choose to install Jolicloud onto my said netbook and while I was there, I wanted to see just how long it might last me on battery power – the results were a lot less then I expected.

Acer Aspire One A150

I bought this netbook when they first come out and I remember making sure I bought one with the least amount of Ram but a decent sized hard drive (120Gigs). The Specifications reads Intel Atom N270 / 1.6 GHz, 1.5Gig Ram, 120Gig Hard Drive, 8.9″ TFT running at 1024×600, a 3-cell Lithium Ion battery with a claimed run time of upto 3 hours and it is 1KG.I have replaced the wireless card in this with a Dell Wireless N Model (when I was using this as a Hackintosh).

The test

I ran BBC iPlayer which played a movie (dawn of the dead) which is using the screen, the wireless and the hard disk as it streams the movie. From a full charge, 30 Minitues later and the battery is down to 50%, so given this, if you wanted to watch a movie on battery alone – you will run short way before the movie is finished, in fact you will get half way through.

Hibernation

I closed the lid and it put the laptop into hibernation mode, thus saving battery, upon opening the lid, nothing happened. I had to press the power button for the netbook to wake up. It was a shame it never had some sort of quick suspend feature as this is one of the reasons why an Apple laptop is so good on battery, if you close the lid on an Apple Laptop, it is saves power and goes to sleep – open the lid and it is back to life.

I know a friend of mine took a train journey to Scotland – a good 5 hours I think to get there and he managed to use Apple Laptop all the way (on and off) and even had enough power left when he got to the other end before it needed power – yet here we have a netbook seeming to struggle keeping alive for one hour.

6 Cell Battery

You can get a 6 Cell Battery which is claimed at 8-9 hours, this adds of course weight and bulk to a small computer. You have to think how they test these laptops to get to the claimed 3 Hours, maybe that’s how long it lasts if it is doing nothing?

I have a desktop machine which I use purely for Linux, the specifications are Core 2 Duo 1.83GHz, 5GIG Ram, 80Gig Hard Drive, 19″ Widescreen TFT and nVidia 7600GT Graphics card. The on-board network has failed and it has an Intel gigbit server card installed (which Windows 7 will not recognise) and a PCI 54G Wireless Card. I had tested Fedora 13 on VMWare and liked the look of it – I set about wiping the present Ubuntu 10.10 and wanted to use Fedora instead on this machine – this is were it started to go wrong..

Fedora 13

Fedora is based from RedHat and much like every distro out there, you can choose the Gnome Look, KDE or various others. Of course one is going to look much like the next if they all run on Gnome for example, what is important here is how easy it is to install software, drivers and generally keep the system running.

I liked the look of the icons so off I went and wiped my current (working) Ubuntu 10.10 install and got this thing running. I do like using Compiz, not so much for the flashy bits but more for the multiple screens, quick switching of applications and finding out what is running at the time. This is were I got stuck to be honest, it told me my current graphics card does not support 3D – Wait, What!!

Using a different Driver

Fedora uses nouveau driver, this is free and not written by nVidia and it looks like it does not think my 7600GT is capable of 3D. After spending time on google, typing many items into Terminal and failing – I start to wonder why I wiped my machine in the first place. I looked around and found that Linux Mint has in fact a new version – currently Version 10 and out in Release Candidate stage.

Linux Mint 10 RC

Not long after Ubuntu finally got to 10.10, Linux Mint which is based off Ubuntu (which itself is based off Debian) gets there new version ready. The best way to describe Mint is you take a mix of Gnome and KDE, add in the various codecs that Ubuntu cannot distribute and you have Mint.

3D Comes as Standard

Once installed, there was an icon informing me there is a driver I can install, supplied by nVidia and once this is selected and installed – we have Compiz in all the glory. What I did like about adding stuff here is you press what looks like the ‘start’ button and type and if it is a package that is not installed, you can do it right there.

Use what works for you

Many people who use Linux say “Ubuntu is bad, use Slackware” or “Fedora is better then Ubuntu” – what I say in fact is your better of using what you know and if your more comfortable type ‘apt-get’ instead of ‘yum’ then go with that. This was the case of Mint vs. Fedora, I coul dhave took the time and got 3D Working in Fedora but I felt it easier and better for me to just install a distro I know how to get working..

As per my other post abut NAS Drives – yesterday I took it upon myself to build a NAS box from parts I already had and thus save myself spending any money. The goal if you recall was to have a system that was able to be upgraded in space later such as adding 1TB or larger Harddrives as needs arose. This journey took a while to get everything ready and was the end result worth the effort involved?

The Acer Aspire E700 Desktop

The machine was a Intel Core 2 Duo 1.83Ghz which had 5GIG RAM (2x512MB and 2x2GIG), NVidia GeForce 7600GT but also had an inbuilt graphics card along with 6 SATA COnnectors internal and a total of 10 USB Ports. A Point to mention was the internal 1Gbit LAN Card was not working. This presently had two SATA Drives fitted, 1x250GIG and 1x80GIG. I added a Intel Pro/1000 T Server NIC I had spare for the networking.

Prepaing the 1TB Harddrive

In my Dell desktop, I had fitted an extra 1TB Harddrive – this stored all my applications, Tunes, Backgrounds, games and so forth. The first (and long) task was to move everything across to my 750GIG Drives that came with the Dell.  A Point to note here was that my Tunes directory needed sorting out anyhow and once I deleted them from iTunes, all playlist + number of plays and so forth would be lost

Preparing the NAS Box

I booted from the FreeNAS CD I had made and went through the menu to install onto a Flash drive (USB) – this was to make sure then when the machine was re-started, it would retain it’s settings. I did a few tests to see how it worked but at this stage no drives were formatted on the Acer. I stripped out the Graphics card, 4GIG Ram (leaving 1GIG) and re-routed the wiring best I could. I did a few tests to see how much noise was present and seemed happy to go forward onto the next stage.

Networking

As my old router broke which had 1Gbit Networking and my present 5 port Gigabit Switch only has 4 ports working – I had two choices here. I could either plug in the NAS Box into the router and limit it to 100mbit or take on of my other machines off the Gigabit network and run it from there.  In the end I thought it was just easier to place the computer near the router and run it from 100mbit port.

Preparing the drives

IN the Acer machine we now had 80gig, 250gig and 1TB Harddrive – all of which could be formatted by the NAS Box. IN the USB ports we had 500gig and 1TB iomega drives which currently have files already on (NTFS). Setting up the drives was easy enough, a long drawn out process though:

• Adding the Drive to the Disks Management
• Formatting the Said Disks
• Setting up a mount point
• Adding a Share per drive

All I ended off with was the same number of shares that I had drives. No matter how hard I tried though, I could not get to add the 1TB iomega drive and I said to myself that I would plug it into a Laptop and make sure it had no errors and such.

Copying the Files across the network

I choose the 250gig drive as my ‘Applications’ Drive – I started to copy across the various directories and was shocked how slow it was going across. I could understand why – 100mbit network compared to 1Gbit is of course going to be a lot slower. I stopped the process as it was getting late and would re-evaluate this NAS Box the next day.

I wish to also make a point about noise, while most people have no issues with leaving a computer (or many) sitting there humming away – I need the device to be silent and also the power it needs is also important – I do not need 250Watts been drawn 24/7 just in case I need a file one day across the network. After powering down all the computers and equipment – the fact it was also very warm that night – I could hear the fan grinding away along with the 2 External Harddrives been hot enough to cook eegs on. I powered the whole lot down – time to re-evaluate my needs.

What do I really need?

The machine that is most of the time is my Dell Core i7, my other machines come on now and then as needed. The few things that need sharing would be:

• Backdrops – This is currently 5gigs
• Tunes – be nice to have them on all machines.
• Applications – On the odd time I need to get them across to other machines.

I had a look though at what machines I use and a loss of 5gigs would be a drop in the ocean for backdrops given how much space each of these machines have. iTunes can already share out the music and the rest was easy enough to copy across the network from machine to machine as needed. The Bottom line is while I would love the idea of a large storage pool with fast copy speeds, I would need to spend some money to achieve this goal and the current crop of Harddrives I own are not worth of making into a NAS box.

End result

While it was a good exercise in making a NAS Box, I am in the process of copying all the files back to my Dell (which is taking a long time) from the NAS Box. I will place the 1TB Drive back into the Dell and move the files back into there respective places. I shall re-built the Acer E700 back into a Desktop machine – maybe using the 250Drive in another machine.

I bought this little Netbook some time back now, it was an impulse buy and the goal was to have a small netbook to take around various sites to SSH into Server and for this it worked great. It came with 512MB ram (cheapest one with a proper HD) and I have installed Ubuntu, Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 through it’s life. I thought I would give it a go at OSX – why not right?

Upgrading the RAM

Now the first thing I had to do of course was upgrade that RAM and I must point out you have to rip this thing apart just to get at the RAM, that’s a pretty bad design by any stretch and the board contained 512MB soldered on, so with only one slot, you can only get up to a max of 1.5GIG – pretty Lame. Had I know this info at the time, I would have stumped the extra cache and bought the 1GIG model. Anyhow, I installed 1GIG DDR2 Ram and this bumped it up to 1.5Gigs which helped the speed a great deal.

Installing OSX

I first tried iDeneb 1.5.1 which is a 10.5.7 distro, I had a problem with the keyboard in that 7’s would repeat and this made it impossible to type in a password or anything for that matter. I moved onto a Guide posted HERE which explains how to do this via iPC 10.5.6 distro and everything went well following that UNTIL I updated via the iDeneb 10.5.7 update and this meant I had to type “cpus=1” every single time, I could have easy fixed this but the next part killed it dead – I chucked in various Kext’s and was met with a white screen and a dead system in fact – moral here is do not go wild and chuck in any old kext or you will kill the system.

iDeneb 10.5.7 (1.5.1)

I was back to this again and worked out that I had to select the PS2 fix which made no sense but it helped and now the keyboard worked as well as the trackpad. I had a working 10.5.7 system at this point minus the wireless and it is known the wireless in the Acer One not to work fully, some have had a little success but mostly it is prone to failure. I tried the various fixes as listed and at one point had the wireless showing up but not connecting and upon reboot was met with a kernel panic.

Dell Wireless Card

With the Dell Desktop, I got a Dell 1505 Wireless N Card which came fitted into a PCI holder – now I had no need for this on my desktop (I connect via gigabit wired) but it would work a treat on the netbook. I ripped it apart once again (getting good at this now) and replaced the wireless and rebooted. Low and behold not only did the wireless light come on (which is new to me) but OS X Booted up. I checked and there was wireless symbol, it showed me all the wireless and I connected. We now had a fully functional Mac NetBook – something Apple has failed to provide as of yet.

Update to 10.5.8

I simply went to software update and updated – problem was, although the machine worked, the graphics were now 800×600 and no Quartz. After searching and finding various fixes, I found the 10.5.7 one and now had 1024×600 with Quartz, there was some slight graphical glitches but mostly it worked.

Working or not?

The end result is a Netbook Powered by an Atom 1.6Ghz with 1.5 GIG ram and Wireless N Networking running OS X 10.5.8 fully updated. It seem’s quite nippy and apart from the small screen size, can do everything a normal apple laptop could. Reason mainly for OSX was speed and just to see if it can be done.  

When I bought this netbook, after looking into it – I did wonder if I had actually bought the wrong one, meaning one with 1 GIG ram for example. After much digging around, I learned the max ram is only 1.5gig it seems – so the 1 GIG Model would have 512MB Stick as well as onboard and as I already had such an Item, I saved myself some money.

I Did follow a gide of sorts to get Ubuntu on there and for most part it worked well enough but there ws a few niggles such as not all web sites seeing the camera or telling me it was in use as well as the internal Mic been disabled. If the machine went to sleep (Closing the lid) it disabled the sound. I choose to move across to Windows on this thing. My task was to somehow run Ultimate Boot CD so I could make a ghost image of Ubuntu and swap back later if required. I eventually gave up on trying to make a bootable USB stick and instead ripped apart a IDE Harddrive to stick a CD ROM on there and allow me to boot and get the image done as well as Install Windows XP Pro.

My View is that the Linux you get with it is way too limited and Ubuntu just does not work as well as could be expected – maybe another Linux (Fedora) might work better. Windows Works very well, you can see the speed go downhill but this is mainly for installing apps and the lag on the Webcam can be seen also. My Guess is with AntiVirus running in the background and the slow CPU – this makes sense BUT WIndows is much more usable then anything else. My Plan is to use it as a portable streaming machine of sorts – maybe I might use another USB Webcam though. I think the machine is fast enough, the screen is workable at the given 1024×600 and the gloosy looks suits well along with the very low weight. If you have a main machine and fancy a netbook for on the move – I would say go and buy one.

After much looking and pondering if I should buy one or even have a need for one, I finally convinced myself that this little netbook was of use to me in one form or another. The Acer comes in various forms, starting at £198 and working it’s way all the way up to £300. The first model would be the A110 which features a 8GIG SSD and 512MB Ram along with a Linpus Linux OS. Once you move into the 150 Range, you have a choice of 512MB or 1 GIG ram, all feature 120GIG SATA Drive and have a choice between Linux (Cut Down) and Windows XP. I checked out a choice of two, one was £229 and had 512MB RAM while the other was the same but had 1GIG ram for example. I thought the bottom square was were the Ram got placed and like any other laptop and I would save myself some Money by the fact I had SO-Dimm Spare from a past upgrade.

After opening the box, I was to find that installing Ram was not as easy as it looked, a Youtube video later and yo had to rip this apart down to the motherboard to get at that Ram. At this point I pondered on taking it straight back before I had opened anything, get my money back and go straight to the other store and buy the 1 GIG model. It is worth noting that the 1GIG model has all that Ram onboard and a slot free, a point to remember. I choose to rip this baby apart and get some Ram in there – I had a week at least to revert and get my money back if all was not good.

I carefully opened it up and installed a 512MB stick of Ram to boost it up to 1GIG, I could have easy put in more (taking from my existing Laptop) but I felt 1GIG was fine for now. Initially I hacked the built in OS (linpus) to get more menu’s as there was not skype installed. I tested a Call with myself via another PC / Skype Phone and me speaking on this Acer via Skype and the build in Microphone. The sound quality as expected was like me inside a Box. I tested streaming with the built in WebCam and again – the quality was blocky. I wanted a full blown OS, so I looked into Ubuntu and this was easy enough to pull off, installing from a USB Stick.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne

After fighting with this for some time, I was left with a few problems, namely sound and Webcam – the latter hanging the entire system. Compiz Works out of the box and is pretty snappy in moving the cube around. The first issue I wanted to solve was to be able to use the webcam inside stuff such as Ustream, Justin.TV and Yahoo Live for example. A Blog had reported that you have to use Flash Player 10 and the fight to make sure 10 was been used was fun but I think I have finally got there. The Audio though is a bit of a different story, the output works fine and can sense when I plug in headphones for example but the Microphone is not happening. If I plug in a Microphone it works fine but the inbuilt (which worked fine on Linpus) is not. I maybe can do some research on this as I may want to use it.

Overall, I would rate this machine as a good buy, it is fast enough to general use and a good Ubuntu Workstation. I would say that putting Windows XP on there would give better control with the included hardware such as Microphone and webcam for example and I may go down this road (Linux was never as good at this part). Should I have bought the 1 GIG version? For mere mortals I would suggest this, I had no problem ripping it open and putting in the extra Ram. The question is though, does the 1GIG model feature all its ram onboard and leave the one slot free (as the 512MB version does) – if this is the case – then maybe it is worth spending the extra £20.