Well, VMware Server 2’s been out long enough without panic-updates so I finally got around to upgrading one of the servers.
There were only five VMs on the target box; the backups – about 250GB worth – went quick enough, disk-to-disk. The VMware software on the Win2K host also went rather uneventfully. Then the fun began.
There’s no standalone management console now, all that stuff is done through a Web interface. I like the Web as much as the next guy, but let’s face it: it’s slower. I haven’t had any trouble with it – yet – but I’m waiting. Next, the remote consoles to the VMs are implemented as a browser plug-in. Fair enough, but try as I might I’ve been unable to get the plug-in to be called by Chrome. I thought I’d have to use IE (it installs fine on IE7) but then I found that one can generate a shortcut that calls the plug-in exe file (my laptop runs XP). The end result is that I can manage the host with Chrome and call VM consoles up as needed. Well, the Windows VMs, anyway. The Linux VMs are fine, as usual with SSH.
Then there’s the VM updates themselves. It’s a one-way process (another reason to have good backups!) and you get a reasonable warning before you proceed. Of course, when the VM’s OS wakes up quite a bit of the virtualized hardware has changed. That means driver changes and such, it’s as though you changed motherboards or something equally traumatic. In my case it all went okay, with one exception. A Windows Server VM would no longer start SQL Server 2000 for lack of a DLL:Â msvcp71.dll. As it turns out I had one handy – quite accidentally, I assure you – so I copied it to the VM’s WINNT directly and all was well again.
I generally use the VM Tools, too, so those were next. The updates were intuitive, but different. From the Server management interface, the necessary files are placed on the VM’s CD-R drive. Then, from the VM, you install from there. Now, there’s been one Ubuntu VM that I’ve never been able to install Tools on for some reason. Never could figure out why and it wasn’t important enough to pursue. This time I simply mounted the drive and everything went flawlessly. Go figure.
All the slogging complete it was time for some testing. I’m pleased to report that every VM is showing solid signs of performance increases across the board! Memory management seems significantly improved, as does virtual disk performance. It’s too early to be saying anything about reliability, of course, and I have yet to experiment with other new features. I may even eventually get used to the Web management interface.
So there you have it. Not bad for a couple of hours of work. VMware Server 2.0 is a free download. If you’ve got a spare box hanging around and always wanted to play with virtualization, go give it a try.
