Category Archives: VMWare

VMware Player and Device/Credential Guard are not compatible!

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What is this?!

Well it turns out that by turning on all the SDK stuff for Windows 10, including the mobile dev, which includes the Windows phone emulator it naturally uses Hyper-V.

Hyper-V Hypervisor enabled

And obviously the two hypervisor’s wont play nice with each-other.  You could just disable it, and go back and forth re-enabling it when needed, or make a new boot selection without it!

I found this post here: Switch Easily Between VirtualBox And Hyper-V WithA BCD Edit Boot Entry In Windows 8.1

C:\> bcdedit /copy {current} /d "No Hyper-V" 
The entry was successfully copied to {ff-23-113-824e-5c5144ea}. 

C:\> bcdedit /set {ff-23-113-824e-5c5144ea} hypervisorlaunchtype off 
The operation completed successfully.

note: The ID generated from the first command is what you use in the second one. Don’t just run it verbatim.

When you restart, you’ll then just see a menu with two options…

  • Windows 10
  • No Hyper-V

Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it?

BCD Boot menu

And just like that on power up, I can switch between Hyper-v and no Hyper-V.

Oh yeah with the latest version of Windows 10 (October 2018) I had to list the BCD table with:

bcdedit /enum ACTIVE /v

As after the upgrade it had tagged both of my boot selections to enable Hyper-V everywhere. I had to delete the #2 entry and re-create the no hyperv dance. {current} doesn’t work anymore.

Compiling rsync for VMWare ESXi 6.5

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So what had started this little ‘adventure’ is that years ago there was this great sale over at Joe’s Datacenter, where I had picked up a physical server for the mere price of $20 USD a month!  What a deal!  No more quotas, CPU sharing issues and generally having to share.  Awesome!

So, I have them install Debian, and load up the KVM modules, and away I go, and life is good.  So foolishly years later, I jumped onto the whole container thing, installed docker, and that is where everything went south.

Every few seconds while doing a tcpdump on the 100% virtual bridge I’d see a massive influx of arp traffic.  I tried static arp’s on the host & the guest and it was ‘better’ but now the network traffic would hang.  Things like TCP would break after a minute and stuff like UDP game state would break so bad it’d end up unplayable.  This basically broke maraakate.org and hosting stuff like Quake I/ Quake II/ Daikatana and other iD based games.

My existing virtual machines now had a major issue where they would stop responding to traffic.  I never could find a fix, and it ended up with me moving my blog out to sloppy.io to keep running as a container-based service until it magically stopped working and I gave up and did a full dump/reload on a hosted WordPress over at ChicagoVPS  What a nightmare!

But what about all those virtual machines?

Well even after apt-get purge of everything docker, upgrading and downgrading the kernel nothing helped.  The VMs still dropped off the network periodically.  So with some spare time I decided to just go ahead and backup the box, and wipe the machine.

Since the physical network was working fine I was able to rsync the 300GB+ worth of data over the span of a few days.  That was fine, and considering how crap the server had been, I figured some straight downtime wouldn’t hurt anything too much.  While looking for an OS to install onto the machine, I saw that Joe offers VMWare ESXi 6.5, so I thought I’d just go with that, as naturally VMWare runs both VMs and with Project Photon I could maybe mess with containers again at a later date.

Since rsync had worked so well for moving hundreds of gigabytes of data from the USA to Hong Kong, I figured it’d be trivial to just convert the existing RAW KVM/Qemu disk images back to the United States of America.  And that is where the fun begins.

Let me tell you!

While reading this great post on virten.net they drop mention of XSIBackup, which requires registration (yuck) and worse their stupid registration system is broken:

LOL WHUT?

Rest assured the email does show up!

Dear Neo Zeed, thank you for visiting 33hops.com
This is your download url http://a.33hops.com/downloads/?key=bq7l5ptPB70MJj9dkftxFegr3xWoBZwpdFPQOUC3Cm10KPSIl3v1532877224253

But of course it doesn’t work

The key is invalid or has expired, only two downloads are allowed per key, download a new one at 33hops.com

What

The

Fuck

I know this is an ongoing issue at large when you provide executable binaries on the internet, as you will no doubt get flagged with some false positive by some virus crusading idiot who just sets up a tool and never reads anything but sends out threatening emails.  I went through this with the need for the simple 404 redirect, all thanks to Gerhard W. Recher.

So since this wasn’t going to be an avenue to peruse, I dug a little deeper and ran across this post over at virtuallyGhetto.  So, it turns out the userland for ESXi is a CentOS environment that uses busybox.  And if you just download and install CentOS 3.9 into a VM, and build whatever you want, and ideally add in the -static flag, and copy it over.  For those who want to look into more ‘internals’ of the userland, check out zemris.fer.hr.

Great!

Things like UID/GUID mappings are broken in the libc it seems among other things.  So for my simple rsync config I just put the numbers in myself.

uid = 0
gid = 0
use chroot = no
max connections = 4
syslog facility = local5
pid file = /var/run/rsyncd.pid
hosts allow = a.b.c.d

[datastore1]
path = /vmfs/volumes/datastore1
comment = WDC_WD5000AAJS2D00A8B0
read only = no

I have read that you really ought to keep your binaries/config on the datastore, so they aren’t subject to upgrades overwriting them and other chaotic stuff.  So editing the file “/etc/rc.local.d/local.sh” I just added the following before the exit 0:

/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/tools/rsync –daemon –log-file=/tmp/rsync.log –config=/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/tools/rsyncd.conf

And then ran it manually to kick it off.

So now I don’t have to rely on someone’s elses broken downoad system, and now we can build other fun native stuff.

And the best part is that after all of this fighting Maraakate’s site is back online and I get this message from him:

holy crap that new server setup so much better
its like playing it locally honest to god
played a whole unit not a single fuck up
no rubber banding lag effect or any of that

So now things are actually performing better on VMWare than we were getting on KVM.  And yes, I had flattened out the disk images, loaded up the paravirtual disk & network drives on KVM, but VMWare does such a surprisingly better job.

I honestly wasn’t expecting that.

And as a bonus, I messed with qemu-0.9.0 (I didn’t feel the need to go through glibc2 hell), and qemu-img works great with a simple raw to vmdk

[root@jdc-user:/vmfs/volumes/5b5806fd-339444da-f897-003048d70598] ./tools/qemu-i
mg.static info win30.raw
image: win30.raw
file format: raw
virtual size: 32M (33554432 bytes)
disk size: 32M
[root@jdc-user:/vmfs/volumes/5b5806fd-339444da-f897-003048d70598] ./tools/qemu-i
mg.static convert -f raw -O vmdk win30.raw win30.vmdk
[root@jdc-user:/vmfs/volumes/5b5806fd-339444da-f897-003048d70598] ./tools/qemu-i
mg.static info win30.vmdk
image: win30.vmdk
file format: vmdk
virtual size: 32M (33554432 bytes)
disk size: 27M

And it boots!

Transcopied Windows 3.0 VM

So yes, wrapping up you can in fact run stuff on ESXi, copy data, and even convert disk images.

Oh yeah, and so people can deal with my 404 based download system (the password is on the 404 page)

Let the games begin!

Fun with Empire EFI & OS X 10.6 on Intel

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Who needs one, when you can have two?

So I wanted to get 10.6.3 running after I somehow ended up with not just one, but two retail copies on my last trip to America… So I’m using the positively ancient Chameleon boot loader, 2.0-RC5 .  I used to use the trendy Empire EFI boot loader, but it’s not working for me anymore with modern CPU setups.

I setup VMWare to use a Windows 10 x64 profile, but removed the hard disk, and re-add it as a SATA drive.  The default SCSI hard disk won’t work at all, but the available SATA works just fine.

Chameleon v2.0-RC5pre7

Boot up the Chameleon boot loader, and then drop to the text prompt (F5/tab) and then put in the following string to the boot loader.

platform=x86pc cpus=1 busratio=7 -v

After a minute or so it’ll boot up, and prompt for a language, afterwards the apple menu will appear, letting us select the disk took, where we can partition & format the disk.

After that it’s just as simple as choosing your options, accepting the license, and then you are off to the install part.

And just like that you are teleported to the magical world of OS X on VMWare.

Personally I like 10.6 as it’s the last version that supported Rosetta, although I guess if you want to run old stuff, you may as well just run 10.4.x in a VM now.  With a copy of Darwin 8.0.1 & 3 disks you can even boot up the deadmoo image, make an image of another deadmoo disk to yet another one, then install Darwin in a much larger disk, then boot back to deadmoo, and restore your 10.4.1 back onto the larger disk, fix permissions, and boot into a larger disk.

phew.

One thing is for sure, it’s a lot of work to get some kind of development machine to mess with WebObjects.  It’s probably easier than buying a G5, but I found yet another one in the States (hence the physical copies of 10.6) and lugged it onto the airplane.  Sigh the suitcase I bought for the trip broke, with one of the wheels coming off the suitcase, and as my G5 was over the 50lb weight limit, I had to pay a $100 USD fee to American Airlines to get my G5 home to Hong Kong.  I packed my “new” Studio Display incorrectly, so the 3rd ‘resting’ leg snapped. Sigh.

VMWare Player is too small on Windows 10! Also what is 1036521??

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So I have to setup a new machine for someone, and going the VMWare route for some essential bits (Running ESXi) it turns out that every VM I try to run gives me this fun error 1036521.

Great

VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0). vcpu-0:VERIFY vmcore/vmm/main/cpuid.c:382 bugNr=1036521

What the heck is this?  It sure could have been made a little more legible but it means that your BIOS needs to have the hardware assist turned on for virtualization.  This kind of thing just reminds me so much of OS/2 and it’s SYSXXXX errors from back in the day.

Speaking of, once VMWare was running the display was incredibly tiny.  This image really doesn’t do it justice, but it’s frankly impossible to read.

What is this? An emulator for ants?

There isn’t much in the way of help for VMWare Player (aka freeloader) version users, however some playing around and I found an acceptable solution.

All too easy, of course once you know where to look

Simply find the shortcut’s location and jump to the compatibility tab, and set the “Override high DPI scaling to “System (Enhanced)”, hit OK and you are now good to go!

VMWare for humans

Now you can actually read what is going on.  Also for anyone who cares, MS OS/2 1.21 really should be on a 100MB disk or so.. large disks & VMWare’s IDE don’t play along so well.

Installing VMware ESXi 5.5.0 Update 3 on KVM

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Well I had no luck with the boot process hanging during initialization.  I searched a little, and came across this thread, stating :

The line that says “Running inside a VM; adjusting spinout timeout to 180 seconds” would suggest that KVM implements enough of our backdoor interface to make it look like we’re running under a VMware hypervisor.  When we’re running in this environment, we use the backdoor to get the host TSC frequency.  I suspect that KVM doesn’t implement the “GETMHZ” backdoor call, so we are confused about the TSC frequency.  The 30ms delay turns into … 30 hours?  30 years?

So they had a source code change for QEMU 1.7.0, however it obviously doesn’t work in 2.x.  It was rolled up stream, and then made into a switch to disable with a simple flag to add into the command line.

-machine vmport=off

So with that set I ran the following:

kvm -vnc 0.0.0.0:1 -cpu host \
-machine vmport=off \
-m 4096M \
-smp cpus=2 \
-drive file=esx-1.qcow2,if=ide,index=0,media=disk \
-serial telnet:127.0.0.1:5001,server,nowait \
-monitor tcp:127.0.0.1:6001,server,nowait \
-cdrom /root/VMware-VMvisor-Installer-5.5.0.update03-3116895.x86_64.iso -boot d \
-net none \
-device vmxnet3,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:00,netdev=esx-0 \
-device vmxnet3,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:01,netdev=esx-1 \
-device e1000,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:02,netdev=esx-2 \
-device e1000,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:03,netdev=esx-3 \
-netdev socket,id=esx-0,udp=127.0.0.1:10000,localaddr=127.0.0.1:20000 \
-netdev socket,id=esx-1,udp=127.0.0.1:10001,localaddr=127.0.0.1:20001 \
-netdev socket,id=esx-2,udp=127.0.0.1:10002,localaddr=127.0.0.1:20002 \
-netdev socket,id=esx-3,udp=127.0.0.1:10003,localaddr=127.0.0.1:20003

And now I can boot up, and install VMWare!

ESXi 5.5.0 on Qemu KVM

By default you will not be permitted to start any virtual machine.  To get around this you have to enable VMWare to run nested.
Add the following to /etc/vmware/config under ESX:

vmx.allowNested=TRUE

And then you are good to go!

VM running on nested ESXi 5.5.0

Running VMWare ESXi 6.5 under Linux/KVM!

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So with VIRL in hand, the next thing I wanted to do was play with some LACP, and VMWare ESX.  Of course the best way to do this is under KVM as you can use UDP to bounce packets around between virtual machines, like the VIRL L2 switch.  I went ahead and fired up 5.5 and got this nice purple screen of death.

Purple screen of death!

So naturally I need to force the processor type.  Also after reading a few sites, I needed to turn on a nested & ignore_msrs settings:

root@ubuntu:/etc/modprobe.d# cat qemu-system-x86.conf

options kvm_amd nested=1
options kvm ignore_msrs=1

Naturally if you are using an Intel processor the statements need to reflect that.  All being well you will see something like this in your log file:

Mar 7 11:34:38 ubuntu kernel: [ 14.802132] kvm: Nested Virtualization enabled
Mar 7 11:34:38 ubuntu kernel: [ 14.802134] kvm: Nested Paging enabled

I got a little further trying to install VMWare ESXi 5.5 update 3, however it just hangs on Intitializing timing…

vMWare 5.5.0 update 3 hanging

(I did later solve the 5.5 problem in a follow up here!)

After going nowhere with that, I went ahead and downloaded VMWare ESXi 6.5 which as of today is the latest version, and that installed just fine!

ESXi 6.5.0 running under KVM

For anyone brave or crazy enough to think about reproducing this, here is my install command line (yes Im doing this old school way on purpose)

kvm -vnc 0.0.0.0:1 -cpu host \
-machine pc-i440fx-2.1 \
-m 4096M \
-smp cpus=2 \
-boot order=d \
-drive file=esx-1.qcow2,if=ide,index=0,media=disk \
-serial telnet:127.0.0.1:5001,server,nowait \
-monitor tcp:127.0.0.1:6001,server,nowait \
-net none \
-device vmxnet3,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:00,netdev=esx-0 \
-device vmxnet3,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:01,netdev=esx-1 \
-device vmxnet3,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:02,netdev=esx-2 \
-device vmxnet3,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:03,netdev=esx-3 \
-netdev socket,id=esx-0,udp=127.0.0.1:10000,localaddr=127.0.0.1:20000 \
-netdev socket,id=esx-1,udp=127.0.0.1:10001,localaddr=127.0.0.1:20001 \
-netdev socket,id=esx-2,udp=127.0.0.1:10002,localaddr=127.0.0.1:20002 \
-netdev socket,id=esx-3,udp=127.0.0.1:10003,localaddr=127.0.0.1:20003 \
-cdrom VMware-VMvisor-Installer-5.5.0.update03-3116895.x86_64.iso \
-boot d

As you can see it really isn’t that involved, well once you get the formatting to make some sense.  And to run it normally I run it something like this:

kvm -vnc 0.0.0.0:1 -cpu host \
-machine pc-i440fx-2.1 \
-m 4096M \
-smp cpus=2 \
-drive file=esx-1.qcow2,if=ide,index=0,media=disk \
-serial telnet:127.0.0.1:5001,server,nowait \
-monitor tcp:127.0.0.1:6001,server,nowait \
-net none \
-device vmxnet3,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:00,netdev=esx-0 \
-device vmxnet3,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:01,netdev=esx-1 \
-device vmxnet3,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:02,netdev=esx-2 \
-device vmxnet3,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:03,netdev=esx-3 \
-netdev socket,id=esx-0,udp=127.0.0.1:10000,localaddr=127.0.0.1:20000 \
-netdev socket,id=esx-1,udp=127.0.0.1:10001,localaddr=127.0.0.1:20001 \
-netdev socket,id=esx-2,udp=127.0.0.1:10002,localaddr=127.0.0.1:20002 \
-netdev socket,id=esx-3,udp=127.0.0.1:10003,localaddr=127.0.0.1:20003

So it’s basically the same, just no mounted CD-ROM image.  Now this is all fun, but what about networking?  As I had mentioned before, I bought a VIRL license, which includes a l2 Catalyst image, so why not use that, instad of a ‘traditional’ Linux bridge?  Sure!  In this example I’m going to connect the 4 ethernet ports from the ESXi into the first 4 ports on the cisco switch, with the last port connecting to a Linux bridge, that I then route to, as I wanted all my lab crap on a seperate network.  To start the switch I use this script:

kvm \
-m 768M \
-smp cpus=1 \
-boot order=c \
-drive file=vios_l2-adventerprisek9-m.vmdk.SSA.152-4.0.55.E.qcow2,if=ide,index=0,media=disk \
-serial telnet:127.0.0.1:5000,server,nowait \
-monitor tcp:127.0.0.1:51492,server,nowait \
-net none \
-device e1000,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:00,netdev=gns3-0 \
-device e1000,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:01,netdev=gns3-1 \
-device e1000,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:02,netdev=gns3-2 \
-device e1000,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:03,netdev=gns3-3 \
-device e1000,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:04 \
-device e1000,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:05 \
-device e1000,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:06 \
-device e1000,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:07 \
-device e1000,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:08 \
-device e1000,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:09 \
-device e1000,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:0a \
-device e1000,mac=00:2e:3c:92:26:0b,netdev=gns3-tap \
-netdev socket,id=gns3-0,udp=127.0.0.1:20000,localaddr=127.0.0.1:10000 \
-netdev socket,id=gns3-1,udp=127.0.0.1:20001,localaddr=127.0.0.1:10001 \
-netdev socket,id=gns3-2,udp=127.0.0.1:20002,localaddr=127.0.0.1:10002 \
-netdev socket,id=gns3-3,udp=127.0.0.1:20003,localaddr=127.0.0.1:10003 \
-netdev tap,id=gns3-tap,ifname=tap0,script=/etc/qemu-ifup \
-nographic

Now as you can see the udp sockets are inverse of eachother, meaning that the ESX listens on 10000 and sends to 127.0.0.1 on port 20000, while the switch listesns on 20000, and sends packets to 10000 for the first ethernet interface pair.

By default VMware only assigns the first NIC into the first virtual switch, so after enabling CDP, we can see we have basic connecitivity:

AMD-kvm#sho run int gig0/1
Building configuration…

Current configuration : 99 bytes
!
interface GigabitEthernet0/1
media-type rj45
speed 1000
duplex full
no negotiation auto
end

AMD-kvm#show cdp neigh
Capability Codes: R – Router, T – Trans Bridge, B – Source Route Bridge
S – Switch, H – Host, I – IGMP, r – Repeater, P – Phone,
D – Remote, C – CVTA, M – Two-port Mac Relay

Device ID Local Intrfce Holdtme Capability Platform Port ID
KVMESX-1 Gig 0/0 155 S VMware ES vmnic0

Total cdp entries displayed : 1

And of course the networking actually does work… I created a quick VM, and yep, It’s online!

AMD-kvm#show mac address-table
Mac Address Table
——————————————-

Vlan Mac Address Type Ports
—- ———– ——– —–
1 000c.2962.09e5 DYNAMIC Gi0/0
1 002e.3c92.2600 DYNAMIC Gi0/0
1 76b0.3336.34b3 DYNAMIC Gi2/3
Total Mac Addresses for this criterion: 3

And of course some obliguttory pictures:

Nested ESXi running a simple NT 4.0 server

And:

Welcome to IIS 2.0

With ip forwarding turned on my Ubuntu server, and an ip address assigned to my bridge interface, I can then access the NT 4.0 VM from my laptop directly.

Nex’t time to make the L2 more complicated, and add in some L3 insanity…

Nested VMWare ESXi

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Virtual datacenter

My physical ESXi box, a lowly AMD FX 8320

One of the more cooler features of VMWare 5 is that it is capable of running itself.  While it

may seem silly at first, this is a great way to build a virtual environment where you can test scripts for provisioning (and destroying) stuff, along with testing API level calls without having to worry about screwing up production, begging for a ‘lab’ environment, or even better snapshotting the whole thing so you can revert whatever it is you are doing at a block level.  In short virtual datacenters really rock, especially for people like me who like to play in a really destructive manner.

So the first thing is that for this test I’m going to use a ‘freebie’ ESXi that I’ve been using for quite some time.  Naturally this should work for version 6, but since the stuff that I’m testing is all in 5.0 and 5.5 (the majority being 5.5) I wan to build a 5.5 environment.  In my insane scenario I have deployment access to a 2003 R2 x64 server with .net 2.0, and the majority of the environment I care about is VMWare ESX 5.5 along with vCenter. 5.5 on Windows 2008 servers.  So trying to mirror this a bit, that means that I’m going to skip the new fangled appliance, I don’t know if it really matters for what I want, but for the sake of trying to keep things the same I’m going to match what I can.

Creating the VMWare ESXi VM

I setup a generic ‘Other 2.6.x Linux (64-bit)’ VM, with a single socket, dual core processor, 4GB of RAM, a LSI SAS controller, with a 32GB disk, and 3 NIC’s with the VMXNET3 driver.  For some reason I had to change the CPU to explicitly allow for hardware MMU emulation.

Hardware MMU emulation

It’s also worth mentioning that when you are going to run ESXi on ESXi that any physical adapters that you want your virtual ESXi host to be able to lauch VMs and have them communicate onto you will need to enable the ‘Forged Transmits’ setting in the vSwitch properties.

vSwitch properties

With that in place, I was able to use my ESXi 5.5 ISO, and install into the VM.  There isn’t much to really say the installer will install ESXi, and reboot and you get the console.

ESXi running on ESXi

I went ahead and gave this ESXi server a static address, and that was pretty much it for the server.

Installing vCenter

I went ahead and used an eval copy of 2008 R2 that is available at Microsoft here.  The installation is really simple, not much to say but for my needs I gave the VM a static address, HOWEVER I did NOT install Active Directory as you cannot install vCenter onto a DC, and I really was not in the mood to have a DC along with a vCenter 2008 VMs as I’m only interested in doing API testing I don’t care about authentication plugins I’m only concerned with other aspects.  Obviously if you do care, then you’ll want to install 2 2008 servers.  I gave my 2008 server a static address of 192.168.1.12 so that I could easily find it on the network post-install.

Since I have no imagination, I renamed the server “vcenter” which of course will factor into the login credentials later on.

My ‘client’ gave me the ISO for vCenter “VMware-VIMSetup-all-5.5.0-3254792-20151201-update03.iso” which of course needs to be installed onto the 2008 server.

install vSphere vCenter

I did the easy install, as again I’m not building a real enterprise.  However I should point out that the easy install has a habit of popping alerts and prompts UNDER the current window so you could be waiting for quite a long long time for this to install when it really shouldn’t take all that long.  I also kept the option for the 2008 Express edition as I’m not going to try to stress the count of VMs 50 is far more than I require as again I’m only interested in limited stuff at this point.

vCenter ‘simple install’ ports

Again I just selected the defaults for the install as I’m not all that worried.  Phew with all of that done, it’s now ready to use!

Logging in

Now I went ahead and hit the following site:

https://192.168.1.12:9443/vsphere-client/#

I went ahead and installed the pluggin for a more ‘full’ experience with the web client.  The link is on the bottom of the page.

download this!

With all of that in place, I finally could use the web/flash site to login, using the local administrator account.  However upon logging in the domain was barren, no vcenters no data centers, nothing.

Empty data-center!

Obviously I must have screwed something up!  Even worse using the ‘fat’ C#/J# client (that I still love…) I would simply get this fun error:

You do not have permission to login to the server!

What? I don’t have permission?

A little digging around, and I found out of course, that it is because I don’t have an Active Directory, and that for ‘workgroup’ installs like this, you need to simply login as [email protected] or ‘[email protected]’ in my case, using the password that had to be set during the SSO installation.

Login

And now I was prompted to create my data-center, and add in the ESXi server into the virtual data-center.

vCenter is now operational

So now I have a virtual vCenter, along with an ESXi host to deploy stuff onto, and destroy all I want.  Even better VMWare Player & VMWare Fusion can also run ESXi nested, so you can take your virtual data-center with you on a laptop!  You can boot 2008 with vCenter in 2GB of RAM, although it really should have 4GB if not more, and with 4GB for an ESXi server that would be 8GB+ on any laptop or desktop.  However I’m lucky my ESXi server has 32GB of RAM, and my laptop has 16.  So it’s also a great excuse to upgrade!

End of the line for VMware Player, Workstation and Fusion?

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It looks like in the wake of a declining stock price EMC/VMware is already laying off divisions, to ‘cut costs’ and I just received word from a friend that the “Hosted UI” group responsible for all these great products, and the former VMware Server/GSX products were all let go.

A Tribute to VMware Workstation, Fusion, and Hosted UI

Which to me is kind of crazy as this eliminates the only desktop product that could run VMware ESX on the desk for building virtual clusters.  I further guess it means that for what I like to do, I’ll eventually have to find one of those super expensive video cards that works with ESX to passthrough.  Or just drop any and all VMware stuff, and head straight into KVM territory and just get used to OpenStack being a fragmented disaster.

In addition they also closed the Burlington tech support centre.

Oh well, nothing lasts forever.

Getting dot1q to work between VMware and GNS3

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So I had this fun episode where I was using Qemu to emulate an ASA, and it worked OK but it was incredibly slow, and I couldn’t put in multiple gigabytes of RAM.  So I thought I’d just dump Qemu and load it up on VMWare.

Well simple ethernet connections work just fine, but the dot1q interface (as this setup has about 50 different connections) doesn’t work at all.

The closest thing I could find was this interesting post, which states:

As I have attached previously there are 802.1q packets leaving the GNS emulated 7200 router but they are not being interpreted by the HOST-ONLY Adapter that is installed with workstation 11 nor does the HOST-ONLY adapter then TAG the l2 frames with the 802.1q ID.

So the host only adapters that I’m creating to give VMWare interfaces that GNS3 can latch onto, strip dot1q!

Well this is no good!

So I thought I’d try the older standby solution, which is the MS Loopback adapter, and try it that way.

Adding the adapter wasn’t too hard in 10, but they renamed it to the KM-TEST Loopback Adapter for some reason.  Anyways with the adapter installed, I removed all the bindings other than the VMware Bridge Protocol.

bindings for the loopback

bindings for the loopback

With that done, the next thing to do was run vmnetcfg, and bind the tunnel interface to a VMnet interface but not in the Host-only connection but bridged directly to the loopback adapter.

vmnetcfg

vmnetcfg

Now with the VMware part configured, it’s a matter of configuring a Cloud object in GNS3, and binding it to the loopback adapter, which in my case has the great name of ‘Ethernet 2’.

vmnetcfg

GNS3 bindings

From there I just attach the cloud to a dot1q ‘trunk’ interface on a GNS3 virtual ethernet switch.

With this proverbial house of cards built up, I can fire-up another VMware machine, in this case a Windows 2000 computer that is bound to a ‘normal’ VMnet adapter, with no fancy dot1a and..

It works!

It works!

I can get IE6 and all it’s glory on the internet.