Hope you all have a good one.

Well looks like everything is falling into place now.

I have just finished the MySQL replication after re-compiling with SSL support. So now the requests and other functions are working again.

I need to change a few of the website scripts to be more dynamic but it all works as of current.

I guess I'll work on moving the other DNAS cluster soon.

Then the FTP Upload server and then the memory leak in our back-end Eggdrop script.

Well started messing around with VMware Server 1.x and was running into all kinds of issues again.

I finally got it compiled though and the raw disk support working. I was then able to start fresh with a new partition structure and installation and get Windows working.

Even though this was working I was still receiving some errors with the real-time clock and a few other things but they didn't seem to stop the VMware from working.

I then tried streaming the audio but found it was skipping/buffering for some reason on the client-end however the server wasn't throwing any errors and didn't seem to be having problems buffering?

The unfortunate part is that VMware Server 1.x is out-dated these days and was built for older Linux kernel's. A number of core functions it relies on have since been modified causing warning/errors during compiling. There are all sorts of hack-like patch files people have made to try and change the include files and modify functions which will get it working but it's not performing 100%. our compile was using 2-3 patches just to get the setup working.

I tried a number of things including recompiling the kernel a number of times to try and change the RTC device driver and did not have any success still had buffer issues.

So I said hell I'll try VMware Server 2.x one more time since we have 1.x working again on the new kernel.

I don't like VMware 2.x as much as a product because of their removal of the Server Browser and the introduction of their ESX style web interface administration and Infrastructure client. These to me have benefits but was not as simple/easy to use as just having a single executable that did its job like the browser did.

That being said I installed VMware Server 2.x and being a newer product it has some fixes for most of the newer kernel include file changes. This means it can compile without patches. I was able to apply one patch to get everything working for us and VMware Server 2.x booted! It also did not have the buffer problems that VMware Server 1.x seemed to have and did not throw any RTC errors.

So we were finally able to get VMware Server 2.x working. The good news too is that the guest as mentioned is performing a lot better in VMware than it was with VirtualBox for what we need to do. It has a consistent cpu load and seems a lot smoother under load. In VirtualBox the host cpu usage was spiking sporadically and kicking the server fans into high gear.


So finally we have success and I can now go back to what I was doing which was fixing the MySQL replication for requests etc.

Alright.

Well I tried Virtualbox, it seemed to be going good in the beginning. VirtualBox in the beginning was it was outperforming VMware Server 1.X however on closer inspection I think in heavy CPU load environments it doesn't cope as well.

One of my disk-image based vmdk's worked fine which ran Linux. I tried to boot my raw disk though and it would say "OS Not found" I realize I would probably have to repair install but I figured it would at least boot the OS and blue screen.

So I ran a repair install which didn't work. I then went through with a fresh install using the same partition and installation over-writing it, this also did not work...

I had to remove the partitions and start again to get up and running, not sure why the raw disk of VMware vs. raw disk of VirtualBox would have slightly different partition table structures?

In any case I got the OS loaded and started running some applications, the host CPU usage was hitting 100% for the application and the fans in the server were going crazy.

I did a lot of reading around including the "HAL" changes to Single processor, they did not help. One I did read from way back was loading a second virtual machine makes VirtualBox behave. For the hell of it I loaded up the second VirtualBox and paused it and my CPU usage dropped under real load to around 30-40%

So loading the second VirtualBox instance for some reason made the CPU usage normal? Hopefully this gets fixed soon.


On to my findings anyway:
Under no load the Virtualbox seems fairly fast, responsive and I like the fact that using VRDP you can achieve better resolutions than with VMware relying on the host graphic card or similar?

However I found that opening programs caused bigger CPU spikes than VMware Server seemed to on the Host and when you start to put the guest under load it in my opinion starts under-performing VMware Server. When there is a lot of intensive CPU operations happening in the guest things start to slow down a lot where as in VMware Server it seemed usable.

Conclusion:

I thought I'd post my findings of where things need fixing and improvements and how I found VirtualBox stacking up against VMware Server. I do look forward to seeing how VirtualBox progresses though and it seems to run quite well in most things.


So now I need to look back at VMware Server 1.X fun stuff.

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...