Enable Time Sync from inside a Linux VM

Note to self: Command to enable VMware Time Synchronisation on a Linux VM without a GUI (with VMware Tools installed):

vmware-guestd --cmd "vmx.set_option synctime 1 0"

To disable it you have to turn around the last two parameters, like this:

vmware-guestd --cmd "vmx.set_option synctime 0 1"

If you want to apply a setting that is already current you will get the message:

"Invalid old value"

This is tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. Source: Timekeeping best practices for Linux on kb.vmware.com

xampp-dsl: A Damn Small LAMP Appliance

Today I ran across a nice Virtual Appliance that consists of the well-known xampp stack (version 1.6.1) installed on top of the tiny Linux distro Damn Small Linux (DSL 3.3). You can get the appliance here . The download weighs in at 154MB and the unpacked size is 379MB.

VirtualCenter 2.5 Passthrough Authentication

Stuart Radnidge from vinternals.com discovered how to do pass-through authentication in VMware VC 2.5. This means you will automatically log in to VC 2.5 when the Windows workstation credentials are the same as the ones VC is working with (so this works if you authenticate to the same Windows Domain on both platforms.) The setting is undocumented but is reported to work. You can find the post here. This is how it is done:

To use it, simply add -passthroughAuth -s vchostname to the end of the shortcut used to launch the VI 2.5 client. By default it uses the Negotiate SSPI provider, however since they have fully implemented the interface you can change that behaviour to use Kerberos by adding the following within the <vpxd> node in the vpxd.cfg file on the VC server: <sspiProtocol>Kerberos</sspiProtocol>

Via virtualization.info.

Creating VM's in a breeze

CreateVM is a shell script I created to automate the process of creating VMware virtual machines (VM's). It makes it trivial to create one or more VM's with specific conditions.

At work I used this script to create VM's with static MAC addresses which are known in our DHCP server, and it helped me a lot to instantly have a clean VM while working on unattended OS installations.

The script is written in bash and runs on any system which supports bash. It depends on vmware-vdiskmanager , which is included in VMware Server and VMware Workstation.

To run the script you first need to download it.

wget http://createvm.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/createvm.sh -O createvm.sh

Once downloaded you have to flag it executable:

chmod +x createvm.sh

Now you can run the script. Run it without any parameters to see the options available:

./createvm.sh

The script has one parameter that needs to be set, and that is the guest OS you want to run in your VM. To see a list of OS'es that are supported run the script with parameter -l :

./createvm.sh -l

To create your first VM decide on which Guest OS you want to run and pass it as the first parameter to the script. In this example I am creating an Ubuntu virtual machine:

./createvm.sh ubuntu

To create the same VM with some more memory pass the -r (for ram) parameter with the wanted RAM value:

./createvm.sh ubuntu -r 512

The script will display a summary of what will be created (see screenshot). The defaults are displayed here. All the settings displayed here can be manipulated by the command line parameters.

To see some of the examples of creating Virtual Machines run the following command:

./createvm.sh -ex

Any major updates on this script will be displayed here.

Screenshot of CreateVM running in an xterm.

Links:

• CreateVM Homepage on Google Code
• Latest version of CreateVM (trunk)
• CreateVM source