I am using a QEMU VM as my main OS.
But still, I have a Lubuntu machine that is serving as a host but technically is unecessary.
As well, I need to sign into the host machine at first and it is running some services like a window manager, networking etc. which is only consuming RAM despite being useless cause of PCIe Passthrough.
So why not running the VM bare metal? I like that I don't have to care about native hardware problems that would occur.
So I was wondering if there was some kind of pure "QEMU OS" that is serving as a compatibility layer between the VM and the hardware?
Maybe a pure linux kernel that is starting a X server and QEMU but nothing more...
Thanks in advance.
I want to install CloudStack 4.2.0 on my 32 bit ubuntu in virtual box. It is possible?
And advantages/disadvantages of this from real machine?
Thanks.
I presume that you're talking about running the Apache CloudStack management server in a 32-bit virtual machine that runs in Virtual Box.
To do anything meaningful with CloudStack, you need at least one hypervisor to control. To avoid the need for hardware, many CloudStack developers use DevCloud. DevCloud comes with configuration scripts that make it easier for a beginner to setup the Apache CloudStack management server.
One issue is memory. If the O/S running VirtualBox is 32-bit, you'll only have 3 gigs of RAM for user processes. Of this, DevCloud will use about 2 gigs, so memory can be quite tight.
Another issue is networking. Make sure that there is a network path from the management server to the hypervisors it is meant to control and the storage that it will use for templates (aka secondary storage).
Yes you can deploy apache cloudstack on a virtual machine; you can deploy even a whole cloudstack infrastructure on virtual machines provided that you have enough RAM.
You can deploy primary storage, secondary storage, mySQL server and cloudstack management server on Virtual Machines; however the host VMs which will provide the execution environment of your cloudstack instances need to provide nested virtualization which is not available in virtualbox, do use VMWare workstation instead as your type2 hypervisor .
good luck
I have access to a machine to which I can ssh. How to determine if my OS is running in fully-virtualized (where VMM does binary translation), para-virtualized or non-virtualized environment? I have some idea of how to go about it (some operations like accessing a memory page/disk will take longer time in a virtualized environment) but don't know how to proceed.
It does depends on the VMM you are running on top of. If it's a Xen or Microsoft VM, I believe CPUID with EAX value of 0x40000000 will give you a non-zero value in EAX. Not sure if that works on VMWare, VirtualBox or KVM. I expect that it will work there too...
Measuring access time is unlikely to ALWAYS show you the truth, since in a non-VM system those can vary quite a lot as well, and there is no REAL reason that you'd see a huge difference in an efficient implementation. And of course, you don't know if your VM is running with a REAL hard-disk controller passed through via the PCI, or if your NFS mounted disks are connected via a REAL network card passed through to the VM, or if they are accessed through a virtual network card.
A good VMM shouldn't show you much difference as long as the application is behaving itself.
Due to the peculiar nature of the application, I'm thinking of running servers such as Apache, Tomcat from within a chroot environment.
Using schroot and debootstrap, I'm able to create a clone of my 10.04 ubuntu(minimal ubuntu) inside chroot directory. I've install tomcat and apache inside chroot . But how do I access these two servers?
Can I access them like a normal apache/tomcat installed on parent server?
Can the parent OS access the apache/tomcat of chroot os?
First, which of these options is possible. Second, any caveats that I should handle with each of these options.
I want something like
Internet ---> [Main host Ubuntu 10.04 Apache ----> (chroot ubuntu Tomcat) ]
chrooting is one of the simplest forms of virtual machines. If your application is security-sensitive, you might consider running a more full-featured solution, such as OpenVZ, Xen, KVM, VirtualBox or commercial solutions, such as VMware and a few others.
That being said, you should really consider to view your chrooted OS as just another host in your network. When you'll be using just chroot, you can access it as localhost (127.0.0.1) with some port number you'll assign to it (chrooted system will effectively share port assignations with parent system), while using other virtualization solutions allows you to assign a normal separate IP to each virtual machine and run it much as you would run a separate physical box.
chrooting is fairly "weak" security solution, is parent and child share a lot of resources almost without limitations (i.e. memory, CPU, process pool, disc space, privileges, sockets, etc). They only limitation in fact is limited filesystem access (i.e. chrooted applications can access only a portion of whole file system), although it provides some degree of isolation.
We have a physical machine that runs VMware and hosts a VM we use for SharePoint deployment testing. That machine is old and dying, and my employer's network czars are heavily pushing hosted VMs as a replacement for outdated physical servers. I was curious about whether it's possible to run VMware inside VMware, and if so, whether there are severe performance implications. We don't require extreme performance from this setup, since it's just used for SharePoint testing and the associated SQL Server is on a different box. My guess is that we can't just use the primary hosted VM for our testing because we'll want to roll back occasionally and otherwise have more control over it, and getting buy-in for that from the network folks is unlikely. Does anyone have any experience with this?
edit: I know this nesting certainly isn't the preferred option, but (1) we want the flexibility of being able to use VMware snapshots at will and (2) the network folks will not allow us to arbitrarily roll back to a previous point in time because of the potential for removing mandated security updates. My guess is that a local desktop machine running VMware Workstation might just be the way to go. The hosted option seems attractive if it will work though since it's less machine maintenance for me to deal with.
The technical limitation with running VMware inside VMware is that VMware, Virtual PC, etc takes advantage of the Virtualization features present in modern CPUs.
If you have two or more hypervisors are both trying to control Ring 0 then there will be problems, this is something that I've encountered while trying to run both VMware and Virtual PC simultaneously on my desktop - one will error out/crash.
If your hypervisor can interact with the 'parent' hypervisor, then you'll be OK. Alternatively if the child hypervisor doesn't try to use the CPU virtualization features, or entirely emulates the CPU (such as QEMU) then you should also be OK.
Basically old-style hypervisors on old CPUs use Full virtualization (slow) which would be capable of nesting with a heavy, heavy performance hit. modern Hypervisors/CPUs use hardware assisted virtualization (near native performance) and you'd be hard pressed to find a hypervisor that is designed or capable of nested virtual machines.
Finally, I'd really advise against running dev/test VMs on the same physical server that is running production VMs. There's just too much to go wrong and security implications - you need to manage the dev/test environment and it sounds like you shouldn't have access to production environment. Likewise you probably don't want the operations team messing about with your test environment.
UPDATE: ESXi 4 now supports virtualizing itself. See this article for more information
I've never run VMware in VMware, but I've run VirtualPC inside VirtualBox without problems, so there's no fundamental reason it shouldn't work I suppose...
It sounds to me more like you have a problem with the inflexibility of your "network czars" than any technical one. If you're a developer or QA you need a testing environment where you can fool around with outdated (and potentially insecure) versions of the OS and applications, without putting the rest of the company network at risk.
Ex-VMware employee here.
Firstly, when you say Nested VMware I will assume you mean Nested ESXi. (You could also mean Workstation, Fusion, or Player).
Nested ESXi environments are unsupported and should not be used for production. These scenarios are not tested in QA and not guaranteed to work. In short, if you experience any kind of problem, VMware will not help you with this Nested ESXi setup.
With that said, yes you can do it and yes it does work. A lot of people use nested ESXi in their labs but not in production. Previously there were special configuration file edits that were necessary for nested ESXi to work. I have seen environments with even 3 layer nested ESXi servers (ESXi vm on and ESXi vm on a physical ESXi host). More recently there is the ESXi appliance which makes this much easier.
Have a look here:
http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2015/12/deploying-nested-esxi-is-even-easier-now-with-the-esxi-virtual-appliance.html
I ran into this same problem. I work at a large company where our entire infrastructure is virtual, so if you need a server you get a VMware VM. So I had a couple of Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition based Guest VM's that had 6GB of memory and 200 GB of disk space, but I wanted to run linux and a LAMP stack on them. So I tried to install VMware Workstation on one and I got an error message saying it couldn't be installed within a VM. I also tried Microsoft Virtual PC and got a similar error message. I installed Sun's VirtualBox and that installed fine, but I couldn't get the networking to work w/in the guest Ubuntu OS. My next step is to try QEMU although performance might become an issue.
You ought to have a look at Mainframes - they are Virtualised from the word go:
Hardware - runs Hypervisor Type 1 - Level 1
on this you have zVM - Type 2 Hypervisor - Level 2
on this you have zOS - your main big operating system - Level 3
and/or
on this you have zLinux - Level 3
and/or
on this you have zVM for testing next version - Level 3
and/
on this you have zOS for testing zVM plus zOS both at next version - Level 4
So going down to level 4 is pretty common
Mind you on a Mainframe you can have 1000's of VMs running at the same time - and most sites who start using zVM/CMS and zVM/Linux usually do.
I can see two solutions for this (three if you count a VM inside a VM which is just crazy).
New hardware, which should be robust enough to handle several VM's used specifically for testing (sharpoint, etc.). In this situation your team could be given more rights without affecting non-testing VM's.
Sharepoint test VM's are moved to the main VM pool and those who need access are given the ability to checkout/deploy/rollback testing resources. This could be direct through VMWare tools or through an internal project that works through a VMWare API.
This should be a joint decision between Network/Dev/Testing.
JFYI:
I tried installing and running VMware ESXi server host(child ESXi server) as a virtual machine(on parent ESXi server) and it runs however you can not run any VMs under child ESXi server.
I am doing practice of VMware vSphere Data center virtualization on single Physical machine. There is VMware Workstation installed on Windows 8 OS. In VM Workstation, I have installed Windows Server 2008 OS, VMware ESXi OS and created the VMware Data center LAB. There is VMs running in LAB, and its confirm that We can user VMware in VMware. But it depends on your need, and Products which is chosen.
You can install ESXi on VMware Workstation, it's usefull to learn ESXi, so there in no reason run VMware in VMware.
Yes. You can run VMWare inside VMWare. Though its not officially supported, You can deploy VMs in the child ESX. I have checked for an advanced feature like PassThrough the HBA card but which was not available in child ESX, hence I could not provide a LUN from array.
So in production its better to not use this.
But for training and practices this can be used.
You can do that.
You can install vmware esxi inside virtual machine of another vmware esxi.
But the performance will be very bad.
Totally works.. totally can't do it other then for some kinda testing or some kind of educational purpose, because you won't get support. and from my limited experience it doesn't perform that well.
Yes, you can, VMware can even detect if it's running inside of another vmware machine and warn you that VMception will cause worse performance. which it will, trust me, just try to get the version the virtual machines work best in a physical machine, as to get as much performance possible.
"whether it's possible to run VMware inside VMware" What?
I can run Windows with Sharepoint in a VMWare machine that's hosted somewhere.
Or, I can run Windows with Sharepoint in a WMWare machine that's actually a VMWare machine that's hosted somewhere.
Why on earth would I add a level of nesting? Why not just go with Windows with Sharepoint hosted somewhere?
You can have any number of VMWares running on a single host. Lots of different versions doing lots of different things.
Nesting them doesn't make sense.