My guess is that VMware does not see creating a Linux version of the VI Client as a priority as the majority of their customers have predominantly Windows environments. But while a Linux client may be a nice-to-have for most customers, it is a must-have for those customers that have predominantly Linux environments. To accomplish this, though, VMware would have to rewrite its client using another programming language because the current client uses the Microsoft .NET framework, which is not natively compatible with Linux systems. By not providing client support for more OSes than Windows VMware is potentially losing customers that do not run Windows and have no desire to run Windows just to use a management client for their virtualization environment. If VMware wishes to further its journey into cloud computing (which is typically predominantly Linux), it may want to rethink this strategy and shift its development to a multi-platform client.

VMware could ditch the software client completely and use a Web-based client instead. VMware currently has a Web-based user interface (UI) for accessing vCenter Server and ESX hosts but it is limited to only managing virtual machines and not vCenter or host servers. Additionally, ESXi — which, according to VMware, will eventually replace ESX — does not support the Web-based UI as it does not have a Web application server installed. Using a Web-based UI is an attractive option as it is OS-independent and anyone with a supported browser could access it regardless of the OS they are running.

So what will VMware do? It appears that VMware is firmly committed to using the vSphere client as evidenced by the many plug-ins VMware is developing. It’s unlikely that VMware will port the vSphere client to other operating systems like Linux or Macintosh and it is also unlikely that VMware will enhance the Web UI to provide the functionality that the vSphere client provides. Having a multi-platform or OS-independent client would benefit all customers; even predominantly Windows shops have some Linux or Mac systems. VMware may surprise us at VMworld with a client support announcement like it did last year, but users will want to see an actual product this time.

Windows 2008 clustering is not officially supported within VMware ESX. That will change eventually, but hasn’t changed in VMware ESX 3.5 Update 4 according to the release notes.

That said, other shared disk clusters do work quite well. The way to set them up regardless of operating system is to use the instructions within the  Setup for Microsoft Cluster Service PDF provided by VMware.

“But this PDF is for MSCS, not RedHat, SuSe, or any form of Linux,” you protest.

I reply: This PDF is for any shared disk cluster regardless of operating system. When you set up a shared disk cluster within a VMware ESX host or hosts you are mainly concerned about the possible limitations, and how to set up the virtual hardware. The limitations are well covered within this PDF as is how to set up the virtual hardware.

When you go through this PDF you want to pay close attention to all examples on how to set up the virtual hardware. If you are working with a Linux clustering system, ignore the Microsoft specific setup but pay close attention to the the setup of the virtual hardware within the prose and ALL examples. The examples give much more information that the prose, specifically on how to hook up some of the virtual hardware and what is supported.

The PDF should be retitled “Setup of shared disk clusters: MSCS, RHEL, etc.”

Chris Wolf, an analyst with the Burton Group, warned that Novell Inc. was similarly at the top of the world in the late 1980s with its NetWare network operating system, which filled a key gap in Microsoft products. Addressing the problem, Microsoft responded with Windows NT, a weaker alternative to NetWare but “good enough” and stronger over time, and featuring a Gateway Services tool with just enough interoperability to make it easy to port data between the two systems.

But that “gateway” eventually became a floodgate, siphoning off Novell NetWare customers, who now had an easy way to migrate to Microsoft NT and a motive for doing so: Microsoft had a much larger package of software solutions while Novell’s NetWare was just a single point solution. Farewell, Novell NetWare.

Fast forward to 2008. VMware is the undisputed leader in virtualization, the hottest thing in the software market. And as part of its interoperability measures, Microsoft’s new System Center Virtual Machine Manager will have extenders to VMware. Microsoft will also launch its far more modest Hyper-V virtualization software at the giveaway price of $28 per server this summer. But, clearly, Microsoft will be working at furious speed to make it more competitive.

VMware, like Novell NetWare, is a point solution, and Microsoft, even more than in the 1980s, is a giant ecosystem with an overwhelming share of the global software market.

“This is a great strategy for Microsoft,” Wolf said. “It’s providing just enough interoperability [with VMware] to give some management with the goal of facilitating migration. And when users get comfortable with those tools, they will slowly migrate over to Microsoft.

“It’s exactly the same runbook as Microsoft ran against Novell,” Wolf said. “It’s pretty eerie.”

Lots of data

I ran the following series of commands to make a place for these files on the ESX system:

cd /home
mkdir adminprofiles
esxcfg-info > esxcfg-info.export.12.7.2007.text

Yes, the name of the file is long – but that will come into play later. Don’t run this command interactively on the screen; way too much information is generated. On my single system with only nine virtual machines in the inventory, it was around 900 KB. I really like this export as a documentation tool and benchmarking mechanism.

I will find myself running this command as part of my server documentation (kept locally in the \home\adminprofiles path or copied elsewhere), benchmarking, and baseline configuration information. I’ll also find this file beneficial for comparisons among systems within VMI.

Details galore

Surely this is mainly as support tool for VMware, but there is really good information in here. I’ve taken out lines for simplicity, check out the following snippets of the output:

Network Configuration

\==+NetworkInfoImpl :
|----Name.........................................vswif0
|----Enabled......................................true
|----Ip Address...................................172.16.25.117
|----Ip Netmask...................................255.255.252.0
|----Ip Broadcast.................................172.16.26.255
|----DHCP.........................................false
|----MAC Address..................................00:50:56:4e:a3:0b
\==+DnsConfig :
|----Hostname...........................................esxlive03
|----Domain.............................................rixco.net
|----Primary Name Server................................172.16.25.2
|----Secondary Name Server..............................172.16.25.3

Virtual Machine Guest Information\==+Virtual Machines:
|----Config File........................./vmfs/volumes/4713cb68-adaa0b06-f0fc-0015173ebba9/S-VMAPP001/S-VMAPP001.vmx
|----UUID................................50 01 42 0b e6 a9 6d fb-37 54 e9 b1 42 c2 3e ce
|----Num Vcpus...........................2
\==+Memory Client Stats :
|----Touched..........................51.20 MB
|----Current Size.....................512.00 MB
|----Target Size......................372.36 MB
\==+Memory Allocation :
|----Valid............................true
|----Minimum..........................131072
|----Min Limit........................131072
|----Maximum..........................393216
|----Shares...........................384
\==+CPU Allocation :
|----Valid............................true
|----Minimum..........................100
|----Min Limit........................100
|----Maximum..........................1000
|----Shares...........................875Check out the tool on your ESX systems. How have you used some of the other esxcfg-… commands?

Depending on how you access your filesystem in Linux, there are many ways to get the files over. I choose to run Samba (smbd) on this Linux box as my means of getting the files to the system and with my particular version of CentOS, after VMWare installed based on my parameters, I could not access the path via the existing Samba share.

Here is what happened, after the installation I added a datastore in VMWare Server. The datastore, for those like me who are used to the Windows world, is the path in which the virtual machines are kept on the filesystem. For my own ease, I chose the path /home/rick/vms which resembles the \My Documents\My Virtual Machines format that I am used to when using the Windows version of VMWare Server. This path was also my home directory for my username. After the datastore was added, I could not access the path via the samba connection while using correct credentials. After some poking around I determined the following command will allow you to restore the user’s access to the path that contained the VMWare Server datastore as root:

chmod 777 /home/rick/vms

This changed the permissions for the this path for the rick username in the home path, to all users read, write, and execute. In my situation, there is only root and rick users configured on the system – so you may want to run the man chmod command to set a more appropriate set of permissions on the path. Once that was set, I restarted the Samba service and I was able to access the path to populate with my existing virtual machines and upgrade them for the VMWare Server 2.0 Beta.