So has anyone played with VMware or some other virtual machine software before?
Virtual machines use software or hardware to simulate multiple machines running on the same computer. With the Dual Core and HyperThreading CPUs that are out there these days, you can download and install VMware and run multiple machines on one physical computer. You probably want to make sure that there is plenty of RAM for both and you probably don't want to run tasks on all your "machines" that are CPU intensive, but lets say that you have a relatively new machine with a dual core CPU, 1 Gig of ram and plenty of HD space. You can install Windows on the system and then run VMware's software. Once installed, you can create Virtual machines in the VMware environment that all use the same hardware. You can run your MS Office tools on your windows computer and run Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Dos or just about any other OS on your Virtual machines that you want. You start the virtual machine, you install the OS (or just download a premade virtual machine from someone else and load it in your VMWare) and you are set to go.
Now lets say you are a business and you have multiple products that you want to show off. You can run VMware with multiple installations and just run the OS/Software you are showing off or using.
What about if you are doing forensic work? You can run just about any OS on one machine that has forensic tools. So for example, you can run the usual forensic tools in windows, but you can capture the image of the Hard Drives using dd (or dcfldd now) in linux and even do some basic analisys work before loading up the big expensive tools in windows. Whats nice is that you can now get a high end laptop and make it do the same thing as 3 or 4 different machines did before in an office.
So the nice thing is that VMware, well known for virtual machines has released the two software driven products VMware server and workstation for free. You can go to their website and download either and as long as your requirements aren't huge, you don't have to pay for their expensive server products!
VMware & Virtual Machines
Moderator: ElTaco
Set up several development environments and test environments using MS Virtual Server 2005.
The dev environment consisted of 3 VM's each with Windows Server 2003. One had VSS for source control the other was the app server and the third had SQL Server 2005, each with about 2 GIGS of virtual memory.
The host machine was a Dell 6650, don't recall the disk space but there was loads, it had 40 gigs of RAM.
The verdict. Fun to play with but a bitch to use for some. I think this had so much more to do with network issues than anything else. Plus there were a couple of other VM's on it including one that hosted a production SharePoint site. As a "sandbox" and prototyping, it was great stuff and I learnt(?) a lot.
The test (not for load testing obviously) environment was a no go. It consisted of two physical servers (Dell Blades, ... I need to look up the exact models, but they were purportedly real high speed). Both of these servers were to serve as hosts (one outside and one inside the DMZ). So there was a VM with Windows Server 2003 for the application and a VM with Windows Server 2003 for the database (SQL Server 2005).
I think the users got through one day of training (testing) at an offsite location and the next day was spent rebuilding the test environment with real machines.
All in all I think the general consensus was that Virtual Server software from Microsoft was neat, fun to play with, but not ready for the "robust" implementation they tout it as being able to do. Of course those conclusions are not objective.
1. Were we using it right ? (I am a developer, maybe I didn't know all I needed to in order optimize configurations and such)
2. Did we have enough horsepower and "plumbing" to do what we wanted ? (HP was adequate but the "plumbing", our network guy didn't think so)
One final comment. In using Blades for this we were causing an even further bottleneck. "Virtual Networks", and two-three machines using the same internal plumbing notwithstanding, the physical machine was in a chassis in which it shared ONE network card with several other blades in the same chassis.
That's all I remember from the experience right now, but if you have questions it might trigger a memory or two. Hope you get something out of it.
The dev environment consisted of 3 VM's each with Windows Server 2003. One had VSS for source control the other was the app server and the third had SQL Server 2005, each with about 2 GIGS of virtual memory.
The host machine was a Dell 6650, don't recall the disk space but there was loads, it had 40 gigs of RAM.
The verdict. Fun to play with but a bitch to use for some. I think this had so much more to do with network issues than anything else. Plus there were a couple of other VM's on it including one that hosted a production SharePoint site. As a "sandbox" and prototyping, it was great stuff and I learnt(?) a lot.
The test (not for load testing obviously) environment was a no go. It consisted of two physical servers (Dell Blades, ... I need to look up the exact models, but they were purportedly real high speed). Both of these servers were to serve as hosts (one outside and one inside the DMZ). So there was a VM with Windows Server 2003 for the application and a VM with Windows Server 2003 for the database (SQL Server 2005).
I think the users got through one day of training (testing) at an offsite location and the next day was spent rebuilding the test environment with real machines.
All in all I think the general consensus was that Virtual Server software from Microsoft was neat, fun to play with, but not ready for the "robust" implementation they tout it as being able to do. Of course those conclusions are not objective.
1. Were we using it right ? (I am a developer, maybe I didn't know all I needed to in order optimize configurations and such)
2. Did we have enough horsepower and "plumbing" to do what we wanted ? (HP was adequate but the "plumbing", our network guy didn't think so)
One final comment. In using Blades for this we were causing an even further bottleneck. "Virtual Networks", and two-three machines using the same internal plumbing notwithstanding, the physical machine was in a chassis in which it shared ONE network card with several other blades in the same chassis.
That's all I remember from the experience right now, but if you have questions it might trigger a memory or two. Hope you get something out of it.
With all the horseshit around here, you'd think there'd be a pony somewhere.
I've played around with VMWare WS a bit and haven't been impressed. Linux host running a Windows virtual environment. The issue I kept running into was that I'd have to manually reconfigure hw after using the virtual OS. Everything seemed to work flawlessly while running the virtual OS, but then I started noticing that, for example, the sound card would stop working for the host OS. I use Linux pretty much exclusively, but there are one or two apps that I need for work, such as our PITA calendar software that requires Windows/MacOS for the client. It was supposed to be a way for me to run a virtual Windows environment without the need for separate hardware. After downloading the eval version and using it for the 30 day trial, I had so many hardware issues that I decided to do a clean intall of the host OS again. I will not use VMWare unless I am really desperate for Windows, which I currently am not. I can make do with open source stuff and/or web clients.....so far.
As an aside, the Xen virtualization environment kicks ass. We are currently using this for developers to deploy changes/new releases in a test environment without making changes to the production environment. Basically, once we have a system set up, we clone it as a virtual system and allow the developers to go crazy with the virtual system. It's working extremely well and makes production changes very predictable. We're doing similar stuff with Solaris Zones, but I'm less familiar with that.
As an aside, the Xen virtualization environment kicks ass. We are currently using this for developers to deploy changes/new releases in a test environment without making changes to the production environment. Basically, once we have a system set up, we clone it as a virtual system and allow the developers to go crazy with the virtual system. It's working extremely well and makes production changes very predictable. We're doing similar stuff with Solaris Zones, but I'm less familiar with that.
Thanks for the info Hobbes.
I'm actually about to build a machine with SuSe 10 on it and am wondering what I can look for in terms of a VPN client AND a terminal client that will let me terminal into a Windows Machine.
Any info on that would be appreciated.
I'm actually about to build a machine with SuSe 10 on it and am wondering what I can look for in terms of a VPN client AND a terminal client that will let me terminal into a Windows Machine.
Any info on that would be appreciated.
With all the horseshit around here, you'd think there'd be a pony somewhere.
Well, we use the Cisco VPN concentrator, so I use vpnc. It's actually an extra package for Suse, so no need to build from source; simply install it from the CD or use a mirror site to install it via yast. Easy to install, easy to configure. One word of caution, though: vpnc does NOT disable local LAN access (which the proprietary Cisco client does) so if you want this functionality, consider inserting rules into iptables to disallow local LAN traffic and only allow traffic through your VPN concentrator.
Regarding the terminal to a Windows system, I'm assuming you want to log in to a Windows system remotely and maybe run administrative commands or something. I don't actually use Windows systems much (yes, I AM an open-source snob), but occasionally I do find the need to get onto a Windows server. If I'm not sitting at the physical terminal, I generally use VNC for this. You can get a free server for the Windows system at the RealVNC site and Suse has a couple of viewers that you can use. I use vncviewer from the command line. Of course, VNC is far from a secure protocol; it transmits everything in cleartext, so you don't want to be sending sensitive information over a VNC connection, but you can alleviate this somewhat by creating an SSH tunnel. I've not done this with a Windows server, but if you googled a bit, you could probably find a decent Howto.
Regarding the terminal to a Windows system, I'm assuming you want to log in to a Windows system remotely and maybe run administrative commands or something. I don't actually use Windows systems much (yes, I AM an open-source snob), but occasionally I do find the need to get onto a Windows server. If I'm not sitting at the physical terminal, I generally use VNC for this. You can get a free server for the Windows system at the RealVNC site and Suse has a couple of viewers that you can use. I use vncviewer from the command line. Of course, VNC is far from a secure protocol; it transmits everything in cleartext, so you don't want to be sending sensitive information over a VNC connection, but you can alleviate this somewhat by creating an SSH tunnel. I've not done this with a Windows server, but if you googled a bit, you could probably find a decent Howto.
-
Shlomart Ben Yisrael
- Insha'Allah
- Posts: 19031
- Joined: Wed Jan 19, 2005 5:58 pm
- Location: filling molotovs
I'm liking what I hear about FreeNX.
"NX uses Secure Shell (SSH) as a transport protocol, which provides authentication and encryption in a standard way."
This is good enough for my purposes, and it seems to have more features than rdesktop. Unfortunately, it doesn't have Samba support (only the commercial version) and that might be a deal breaker.
If anyone knows a VNC deriviant that has Samba support "out of the box", let me know.
"NX uses Secure Shell (SSH) as a transport protocol, which provides authentication and encryption in a standard way."
This is good enough for my purposes, and it seems to have more features than rdesktop. Unfortunately, it doesn't have Samba support (only the commercial version) and that might be a deal breaker.
If anyone knows a VNC deriviant that has Samba support "out of the box", let me know.
rock rock to the planet rock ... don't stop
Felix wrote:you've become very bitter since you became jewish......
Kierland drop-kicking Wolftard wrote: Aren’t you part of the silent generation?
Why don’t you just STFU.