Status Update (22/03/09)

Well that was a fun weekend, well not really.

I started working on the MySQL replication and was doing pretty good. I have almost got that finished, just need to be recompiled with SSL support I believe.

In the process I decided to upgrade the main back-end server to Debian Lenny previously running Etch. So the versions of MySQL etc were hopefully the same.

The upgrade involved of course changing the kernel to the latest stable Debian version 2.6.26 and upgrading most of the packages to the latest builds.

In the process of this it broke our previously running VMware Server 1.0.4 as the kernel modules were removed (outdated).

I spent most of the weekend trying to get VMware Server to recompile on the new kernel...

I started by downloading the latest version from VMware's site which I thought was 1.0.8. VMware Server 1.X doesn't like to build on the new kernel and reading around there are some dodgy hack work-arounds that attempt to "patch" VMware files to work on the newer kernels because some of the source include files have changed kernel-wise.

These don't easily work. I did at some points get the VMware Server 1.x installed but the modules were either mis-matched versions because of the hacked up patches (injecting wrong version numbers or for products most likely like VMware Workstation or similar) which I figured this is bound to crash later or it would install but not want to load our previously working VMware images...

Now we use a "raw disk" which VMware class as an "Advanced" setup, though it seemed relatively easy to setup after you got around VMware's stupid shit wanted a /dev/sdX device for example instead of our pure RAID device /dev/cciss/cXdX or similar. However it is changable later in the config files... anyway enough about that back to the story.

"raw disk"means rather than using a VMware image file we actually talk to a physical RAID array (In our case) or hard-drive. It did not like to talk to it after the Kernel upgrade for some reason, I tried a lot of things.

I then found the new VMware Server 2.0 on the website I had completely overlooked. This compile against the later kernels without any hack, however it throws a few warnings along the way. The funny part is VMware decided in 2.x that they would remove "raw disk" support in this version...

Now VMware Server 2.X is a bit of a jump from 1.X they are trying to what it looks like make the look and feel feel like their Enterprise products like ESX. They now have a "Web Interface" over the previously great and usable "VMware Server Console". Then yeah they decided to remove some great features (supposedly because they were either strapped for time or believe they were not high on the priority list which sounds like bullshit) like "raw disk" support, now reading around supposedly the code is still there but I could not successfully get it to load the old VMware images. I tried a lot of things and spent a lot of time reading.

In the end it sounds almost like if you have a standard VMware image and then you can add a physical "raw disk" to the image which would be usable in the guest. I needed to boot off one and it would just not work...

So after spending a day and a half trying to get VMware I finally decided fuck VMware.

I looked at Xen Source which I didn't realize was Open Source again since they were I believe bought by Citrix maybe? however it seems it is and these days has Windows guest support. The unfortunate part is after reading around the Windows guests are only usable in Xen if you have "hardware virtualization" VT. So that threw my Xen ideas out the window as the server we are currently using is an older generation.

I then saw VMware ESXi is "Free" however it's a platform OS, I didn't really want to remove the entire operating system just to then run 2 virtual machines instead of 1? We aren't making massive Virtual Server machine.

So finally I looked at Sun's new VirtualBox, I know people who have been using it on Windows and I knew it would probably work on Linux however I didn't know how well it would run and whether it could start automatically on system boot, require user intervention etc...

So I read the entire manual for VirtualBox and it seems they have a tool included which is VBoxHeadless which allows you to run a VMware machine without X11 and it just spawns an instance with remote RDP access.

Brilliant. Now originally I originally thought "RDP" well that obviously means it's fairly limited I can't view DOS/console when the system is booting, what am I going to do for Linux if I wanted to use it" etc. It turns out they are talking about a "VRDP" (VirtualBox RDP) which is actually their own sort of protocol (built using standards compatible with RDP) and allows you to see the console and boot-up etc.

Perfect, so I went about loading up one of my older VMware test images in VirtualBox and it actually worked quite well. It loaded first time, I had to obviously load the Guest Tools but I was able to connect using RDP from my Windows machine and was able to get it all working. In some ways it actually feels more responsive and you can use higher resolutions, however we are not currently using all the processing power of our Radio Virtual machine which could slow things down.

Now I still don't know how the performance of VirtualBox will be in comparison to VMware when doing heavy streaming/encoding, so at this point I still don't know how it will perform.

I have checked the manual as I said and VirtualBox does allow "raw disk" support.

So hopefully later on I will try and mount this up, will most likely have to repair the Windows install as the Virtual drivers are probably different and then see how we go.

It looks good so far though and VirtualBox so far has been leaps and bounds easier than VMware (Once you understand their systems) and hasn't had issues on the more recent Kernels like VMware Server was.

I understand VMware Server is "free" and their focus is more on their enterprise products, but fucking up VMware Server like they have with an ESX style web-interface which is absolutely shit, sometimes gets stuck causes because of most likely poor Javascript/AJAX which can sometimes cause VMware to crash and then removing great features like "raw disk" support which they originally had is fucking frustrating. you can use a "VMware Infrastructure Client" to connect to VMware Server 2 however it's limited in the fact you can't import VMware configurations for example only create new ones.

In any case hopefully I can get some Sun-shine from VirtualBox and get everything operational again and then finally fix the MySQL replication. That will get two things out of the way...