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VMWare Server 2 redux

Recently I had trouble running VMWare Server 2 (RC1), so much I gave up on it. I tried again, this time RC2 on Linux and the experience is a little better - at least it works. I had to use tricks to force it to use a raw (physical) drive (this feature has been officialy removed) and a different emulated ethernet device.

Keywords: FreeBSD, VMWare

I wanted to boot my raw partition with FreeBSD under VMWare Server 2 so I had to find a way to configure VMWare to do so. This feature was present in VMWare Server 1 but is removed in the new version. Fortunately I've done something similar before and I have a script that makes VMWare use raw disk images, which was easy to modify to work with devices (at least on Linux - I have no idea if it will work on Windows). Just run the modified script on your device and it will output the contents of a .vmdk file you can use in VMWare. Of course, if you use this way to boot the guest OS, you'll likely have problems with partitions and file systems in /etc/fstab but anyone trying this should know how to solve these.

My second problem is that the host's hardware has an em network card with a fixed IP so when I start the system under the VM it clashes with the IP of the host. It's a good thing that the default emulated NIC is Intel's "e1000" in the new version, but to modify it you have to edit the .vmx file describing the VM and change

ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"

to

ethernet0.virtualDev = "vlance"

This allows me to have DHCP for le0 and static IP for em0.

Note: there's a place in the configuration UI (the web based one, which I still hate because it hasn't improved a bit) that looks like it's intended to hold these "advanced" configuration parameters but don't be fooled by it - it doesn't work for this. Apparently, some settings are "blessed" by VMWare as being inaccessible and unchangeable by the UI.

Btw. running a 64-bit FreeBSD guest on a 32-bit Linux host works (it also worked in 1.0).

Posted on 2008-08-21T12:29 by ivoras

#1 Can you share the altered makeraw.py?

Added on 2009-10-26T23:48 by Georgios

Hello,


Can you please post the modified makeraw.py that works with devices? I'm trying to make this work with vmware server 2.


Thanks.

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