REALLY need some help from a VMware GURU

[cyr0nk0r]

I am looking for someone that knows VMware workstation 6 inside and out. I have a pretty good grasp of it, and have quite a few clients running in virtual machines at the moment but feel that I am not making the most out of my resources.

I know there has to be a better way than they way I am doing it. I was wondering if there are any VMware Guru's out there that I can pick their brain.

Please PM me as I'd rather speak through AIM or email. Thanks!

 

[heymrdj]

I thought this would be VMWare Server. I'm a guru of that, not Workstation. Sorry

 

[cyr0nk0r]

Well, let me describe what I am trying to do and tell me if workstation will do it.

I currently have about 6 windows server 2003 virtual machines. Each one runs a custom install of a software our company uses. Without touting all the bells and whistles, it basically it a specialized web server running on it's own install of tomcat and java. It uses only ports 80 and 443 for communication.

Each VM hosts a seperate install of this software. Each VM has a unique internal LAN IP, which is NAT'ed from a Public WAN IP for each server. All the VM's are exactly the same with the exception of the different install settings for our software. No other software is installed on the servers. Base 2k3 install with updates, etc.

Now then, how we set them up for rapid deployment is we have a base VM that already has the OS installed and updates and everything (pre software install). When we want to deploy a new VM we simply do a full clone of the base VM, rename the computer and give it a different IP. Then install the software.

The problem is we are running out of disk space on the server that hosts the VM's and I don't want to move the VM files to a networked drive. Each VM once we deploy it eats up about 5GB of space. And the SAS drives aren't very big to begin with and we only have about 10GB left on them.
I am wondering if we can setup a "linked clone" setup where each new VM is simply a linked clone from the base VM.

Would the linked clones allow us to have different IP's, computer names, software installs, etc? Or are we better off with the full clones?

A caveat is that each VM must "appear" from a remote user standpoint to be a fully dedicated machine as users log in to the VM's to do work. But they only work on their particular VM without seeing or otherwise knowing about all the other VM's.

 

[Nothinman]

I see what you're trying to do and I'm 99% sure that VMWare Server won't do it, but I haven't gotten a chance to play with Workstation 6 or ESX. The problem is that even if they all started from a common root image just running will change things on that filesystem so it would still need a per-VM image to write the changes to and eventually that changes file would be comparable or larger than the original image. If the VMs contained a form of unix then you could mark the base image filesystems read-only and have all of the per-VM apps and settings on a separate filesystem but I don't even think that would be possible with Windows.

 

[tomt4535]

I dont think you can do that. Think of it in a physical server. You cant have multiple operating systems running at the same time off the same files on one hard disk. Same thing with the .vmdk virtual disks. What you can do, is try to limit the ammount of RAM for each VM. The vm's swap file is created at the same size as the ram allocated to that VM. If you give it 2GB, you have a 2GB swap file in addition to the virtual disk etc. You might be able to get away with giving the virtual machines less ram, but since you are using workstation, you probably dont have alot of ram to go around anyway. If your company is really serious about VMware, get a nice server(or servers) with a ton of storage(or a SAN) and ESX Server. Ive been working on installing ESX 3.5 on our new boxes at work and its amazing. Cheaper, easier solution: get bigger SAS drives

 

[cyr0nk0r]

Well, RAM is not the issue. The server has 2 dual core Xeon's at 3ghz with 8GB of ram. The SAS's are 10k rpm in RAID 1.

What is the point of getting ESX? Will ESX allow me to do what I want? If not, there is no benefit to getting it.

 

[her209]

Originally posted by: cyr0nk0r
When we want to deploy a new VM we simply do a full clone of the base VM, rename the computer and give it a different IP.

Are you cloning a system that has been sysprep'ed?

 

[her209]

http://www.vmware.com/support/...mmon/disk_sharing.html

 

[mcmilljb]

Originally posted by: her209
http://www.vmware.com/support/...mmon/disk_sharing.html

Interesting stuff.

I just wish VMware would spend more time advertising (and showing off) what they can do. They spend too much of it on saying virtualization is good like it's a buzzword instead of showing how very useful a tool it is.