Hello and here’s Goomba141 here with a Software Spotlight! What is a Software Spotlight? It is when I make a post about great software (aiming to be freeware!). So here is the product of the month: Virtual Box.

What does VirtualBox do, some of you may ask, well VirtualBox is is similar the Microsoft Virtual PC, but better! If you heard of VMWare Fusion or VMWare Workstation, Virtualbox does that too, and it supports Linux, Windows, and Mac, but best of all, it’s FREE!!! Yep, it’s free! It supports Windows, Linux, and Mac (Only on macs), as guest OS’s.

VirtualBox is also opensource, allowing anyone to make it run better! It has USB support, guest additions work on all three OS’s, and if you those virtual hard disks from your old virtual machine manager, you can just open them with from VirtualBox.

So if you are interested in VirtualBox, you can download it here.

-Goomba141

Required programs: VMware Virtual Machine Importer 2

The purpose here is to convert a VHD file to a VMDK file and then upload it to a VMware ESXi 4.0 server.

First, start the importer. Click Next.

Select Import a standalone machine. Click Next.

Browse to the VMC file associated with the VHD file. Click Next.

Choose VMware workstation virtual machine as the destination. Click Next.

Give the virtual machine a name and choose the destination directory.  Select Workstation 5.x, VMware Player 1.x and VMware Server 1 under Create this virtual machine for. Click Next.

In Disk Options, choose Create a full clone, and Allocate all disk space now for better performance.  Click Next.

If all the settings look ok, click Next.

Tonight I’ve been reading about security implications of migrating virtual machines between physical hosts in the data center cloud. I think this is far from the awful problem the authors make it out to be.

Live migration of virtual machines between hosts in a cloud provides large benefits in reliability. Migration allows virtual machines to be moved from hosts requiring maintenance, they can be moved to avoid imminent disaster, or moved to balance loads across the cloud. This gives us maximum uptime and the most consistent performance for the virtual machines.

The first objection to this migration is to insure the migrated virtual machine retains all of its security settings, storage access, and etc. This is a bit of a red herring to me. These are either things under control of the virtual machine (the cloud hosts couldn’t manipulate them anyways) or they are things that, if wrong, wouldn’t allow the virtual machine to continue to run. Not a security risk by any means.

The second objection is that any facilities such as load balancers have to know the virtual machine migrated. Not at all. Considering Xen Cloud Platform (which we use for our cloud), virtual machines retain their IP settings and the MAC addresses of their virtual interfaces. No external system has any idea whatsoever which virtual machine is running on which physical cloud host, or even which are virtual machines or physical machines. It’s all completely transparent.

Since no outside application that interfaces with the virtual machine, be it load balancer, firewall, etc has any way of knowing where the virtual actually lives in the cloud, there’s nothing to migrate when the virtual migrates.

The cloud does indeed demand uniformity of the equipment in it, but that has nothing to do with migrating virtuals and everything to do with basic cloud functionality. XCP, for example, will not permit physical hosts to join the cloud unless they match in terms of CPU, memory, and Ethernet ports. It doesn’t matter who the vendor is or even that the hardware is an across the board full match as long as those items match.

Migrating virtual machines isn’t as hard as you might think.

Vern, SwiftWater Telecom

virtual data center cloud service

You may have had a requirement to increase the space on the system drive of a Windows Server only to find that even though there is unallocated space to extend into you cannot extend the partition.

There is a neat workaround that I have tried a few times that works very well.

• Power down the Virtual Machine

• Make a backup copy of the Virtual Machine. Depending upon your flavour of VMware this can be done a number of ways. I like to browse the datastore using the VI client and take a full copy of the VM.

• In the VI client edit the settings of the VM and increase the system partitions’ virtual hard disk to the desired setting and apply

• Next you will need a second VM that is also running Windows 2003 Server. Power it down. In the VI client edit the settings of the second VM and Add a Hard Disk.

• Select Use an existing virtual disk and Browse to the actual location of the first VM’s system disk

• After you have added the disk and applied it, power up the second VM

• Open Computer Management > Disk Management and you should see the system disk from the first VM with the accompanying Unallocated space

• Run the Diskpart utility from Start > Run > Diskpart

• Type list volume which displays all available volumes. Locate the volume to increase and type select volume x (where x is the volume number)

• Finally type extend. If it has worked the message Diskpart successfully extended the volume should appear

• Shutdown the second VM and in the VI client remove the hard disk from its configuration

• Power on the first VM and voila, your system partition should now be fully utilising the allocated space

Sure, you know cloud computing. You also know a bit about so-called “private clouds,” which enterprises and government agencies are exploring as an option to combine the power and scale of virtualized cloud architectures with security and control over data.

But what do you know of Cloudlets? They may just be a key to the future of mobile computing.

That’s a possible conclusion from the results so far of a Microsoft Research family of projects called MAUI, short for Mobile Assistance Using Infrastructure. The MAUI approach is to enable a new class of CPU-intensive, and data-intensive, applications for mobile devices – but enable them in a new way.  Today’s mobile devices can’t run such apps, at least not well. And if they stick to the cloud they may never do so.

I’ve just read a fundamental MAUI paper published last month in the IEEE’s Pervasive Computing journal: “The Case for VM-based Cloudlets in Mobile Computing” (November 2009, co-authored by MSR’s Paramvir Bahl along with colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University, AT&T Research, and Lancaster University).

The paper is worth reading just to get a reality check on the current cloud mania in popular technology; topics include: The Limits of Cloud Computing; Why Latency Hurts; WAN Latency is Unlikely to Improve; and Bandwidth-Induced Delays Also Hurt.

Illustration from the IEEE paper

As the paper describes, “Resource poverty is a fundamental constraint… On hardware that people carry or wear for extended periods of time, improving size, weight and battery life are higher priorities than enhancing compute power. This is not just a temporary limitation of current mobile hardware technology, but is intrinsic to mobility. Computation on mobile devices will always be a compromise.”

And we can’t rely on the magic of cloud computing to deliver better resources.  In short, it is unfortunately inescapable that ”long WAN latencies are a fundamental obstacle… Even trivial user-application interactions incur these delays in cloud computing.”  And beyond those trivial apps, we already have mobile apps trying to deliver advanced, computation-intense capabilities like speech recognition, NLP, assisted vision, machine learning, and augmented reality. Those apps suffer because cloud computing isn’t powerful enough to support them seamlessly across a WAN like the public internet.

So MAUI researchers believe that “Rather than relying on a distant cloud, the resource poverty of a mobile device can be addressed by using a nearby resource-rich cloudlet.” In their paper, they write:

We put forth a vision of mobile computing that breaks free of this fundamental constraint. In this vision, mobile users seamlessly utilize nearby computers to obtain the resource benefits of cloud computing without incurring WAN delays and jitter. Rather than relying on a distant “cloud,” a mobile user instantiates a “cloudlet” on nearby infrastructure and uses it via a wireless LAN. Crisp interactive response for immersive applications that augment human cognition is then much easier to achieve because of the proximity of the cloudlet. - “The Case for VM-based Cloudlets in Mobile Computing.”

Here’s a bit more detailed description of what the cloudlet looks like:

Cloudlets are decentralized and widely-dispersed Internet infrastructure whose compute cycles and storage resources can be leveraged by nearby mobile computers. A cloudlet can be viewed as a “data center in a box.” It is self-managing, requiring little more than power, Internet connectivity, and access control or setup. This simplicity of management corresponds to an appliance model of computing resources, and makes it trivial to deploy on a business premises such as a coffee shop or a doctor’s office. Internally, a cloudlet may be viewed as a cluster of multi-core computers, with gigabit internal connectivity and a high-bandwidth wireless LAN.

There’s one last bit of important description from the IEEE paper about the cloudlet scenario,

The mobile device functions as a thin client, with all significant computation occurring in the nearby cloudlet. Physical proximity of the cloudlet is essential: the end-to-end response time of applications executing in the cloudlet needs to be fast (few milliseconds) and predictable. If no cloudlet is available nearby, the mobile device can gracefully degrade to a fallback mode that involves a distant cloud or, in the worst case, solely its own resources. Full functionality and performance can return later, when a nearby cloudlet is discovered.”

That sounds a lot like typical WiFi scenarios, doesn’t it? Mobile devices and their users have already become attuned to the hotspot paradigm – it might be interesting for that to be extended to hotspots of dense computational resources which light up your handheld or goggles and transform them from normal devices to immersively augmented supercomputers.

There’s much more work to be done, on technical issues like dynamic VM synthesis and on figuring out the business model for cloudlets. As the paper’s authors muse, “Is deployment driven bottom-up by business owners installing cloudlets for the benefit of their customers, much as they install comfortable furniture today? Or is it driven top-down by service providers who share profits with the retail businesses on whose premises cloudlets are deployed?” These are fascinating questions which have puzzled ISP’s and wireless providers for a decade now.

I’ll certainly follow up on the cloudlet progress in Microsoft Research in future posts.

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Windows  7 Pro offers a cool feature that allows you to install a Windows XP virtual machine to run old programs that do not work in Windows 7. Microsoft calls it Windows XP Mode. This feature does not come pre-installed and you have to reconfigure your BIOS for this feature to work. For instructions on how to get Windows XP Mode and the BIOS changes please click here. The whole idea of this feature is that when you install a program in Windows XP Mode the program should appear on the Windows 7 start menu.  Then you can click on the program and the program will run without loading the whole Windows XP Mode virtual machine. Now according to the Microsoft official videos and documentation all you have to do is load the Windows XP Mode virtual machine, install the app and then the icon should appear on your Windows 7 Start Menu like the picture below.

This only works if the program you install puts icons in the Start Menu in Windows XP virtual machine. If it doesn’t then you will have to create a shortcut icon in Windows XP virtual machine and make sure it is placed in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs. After the shortcut is placed in the path then the icon will show up on the Windows 7 Start Menu like the picture above. Something I learned the hard way.

Ubuntu 9.10(Karmic Koala) released in October 2009.

I install Ubuntu 9.10 as a virtual machine inside Windows Vista (as i dont want to make my system dual boot.) Here is a brief step by step guideline to setup Ubuntu 9.10 as Virtual Machine in Windows Vista.

• First install VMware Player (free software, all you have to do is one simple registration) from here. I have installed the latest version of VMWare i.e.3.0 (VMware has recently released the 3.0 version of the software.)
• Second requirement is Ubuntu 9.10. You should either have CD (in my case) or iso image (Size is around 700MB, download) of Ubuntu 9.10.
• Now start VMWare, click on “Create a New Virtual Machine” option. This will in turn show you the “New Virtual Machine Wizard” where you select the installation method.

• Since i have Ubuntu CD, so i will go for “Installer Disc” radio button; if you have iso file then select the “Installer disc image file (iso)” option, browse the location,wait and VMWare will detect and show “ubuntu 9.10 detected” message.

• Click next, Enter Virtual Machine Name and Location (Where you want to store the newly created VM to be stored) Click next and select Maximum disk size, by default it is 20GB. I think this much is enough as i am not going to store media files or heavy applications in this VM. Practically it will not use 20GB at once. Initially the size will be around 3GB (as in my case), as you go ahead and install some stuff in your Ubuntu Virtual Machine, the size will grow but will not go beyond Maximum size (20GB or whatever you select).

• Click next and if you are OK with the default settings (as i’m ) click finish. After this VMWare will start installation of Ubuntu 9.10 as Virtual Machine. After installation you’ll see one black screen having some text like: “VMWare Easy Install.. please wait ! VMWare tool is currently being install…etc ” followed by “ubuntu login prompt: ” :

wait some time untill it shows GUI(Login Screen) . On Login Screen click on user name, enter password and enjoy Ubuntu 9.10 as virtual Machine within Windows Vista.

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- Abhishek Singh

By Dave Demlow
published: Thursday, December 10 2009

2010: Looking Into the Clouds

In 2010 we will see increasing interest and activity around cloud provided infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providing on-demand, pay as you go access to scalable compute and storage infrastructure. Clearly IaaS will not be the only area where services will be provided by the cloud, but it’s getting so much attention because it is a model that can be easily understood by most people, can evolve from and work with existing enterprise applications and architectures and can be quickly and easily trialed in low risk areas such as test or development and expanded incrementally. In addition, there are already a surprising number of providers to choose from with similar but differentiated service offerings and pricing models that can meet a variety of market needs.

I say IaaS is easily understood because when it comes right down to it, it’s all about virtual machines which by now are very well understood. Package up your operating system and application stack into a nice portable container, and run that container on a shared infrastructure but isolated from other workloads sharing the same infrastructure. The next logical question is whether to own the all the infrastructure to run those containers, which depends on the nature and longevity of the workloads, the utilization of existing infrastructure, geographic constraints (sometimes), compliance, legal issues, management preference, and of course, cost. I expect for the foreseeable future that most companies will want to have a mix of internal and external infrastructure to meet the changing needs of various workloads.

 As a software developer, and particularly as the developer of software commonly used to replicate, failover and recover these “workload containers” (whether they are already virtualized or not) from one geographic location to another, we have been very early cloud watchers and users ourselves.

 In addition to the test and development benefits that most software companies can receive by utilizing cloud infrastructure resources to run virtual machines in the cloud at least for peak demand times or special ad-hoc projects, being able to test things like cross country or trans-Atlantic data replication using virtual machines distributed across multiple clouds, purchased just for the time we are using them is fantastic. Of course, it also makes you start to think about many other possibilities.

 Within a datacenter or corporate WAN, there are tools like ours available that can continuously backup and failover workloads on physical or virtual servers into virtual machines (P2V and V2V failover) in different locations for disaster recovery and high availability. If IaaS can allow me to run virtual machines and standard operating systems and applications, can I use it as a recovery site and actually failover workloads from my datacenter to the cloud?  Sure, with the right networking and technologies, it’s certainly possible (and available). Coincidentally this mirrors the same thought processes and customer adoption that we saw early on when server virtualization itself was first limited to test environments, then moved to disaster recovery which gave people the confidence to start moving production workloads into their virtualized infrastructure.

 For the full article, click here!

Perhaps the most brilliant and subversive feature of the Google Chrome browser is its distribution model. It has a one-click installer that will work for a limited rights user account. The way Google pulls this off is that they install Chrome into the %LOCALAPPDATA% directory for the current user rather than the secured %ProgramFiles% or %ProgramFiles(x86)% directory. What this means is that many corporate people that cannot run the Firefox installer or get Firefox to work without serious rigmarole can install Google Chrome easily. I have seen this take off in corporate offices by word of mouth.

What I want to do is run the release version of Google Chrome in Windows Virtual PC on Windows 7 and use the application publishing feature while I run the beta channel Google Chrome on my host Windows 7 machine. The problem is that in order for the virtual application publishing to work properly Google Chrome needs to be installed for all users.

I could do this by installing Chrome and then manually moving things around, edit the registry and create an All Users shortcut. Or I just discovered the Google tool to install Chrome for an entire machine.

If you use the Google Pack, you can install  Chrome Pack machine-wide. Get the pack from http://pack.google.com.

Go, fight, win!

I had two physical boxes running OpenSolaris. One of them is an old Dell optiplex machine with just 1 gig RAM. But I dedicated the entire 40Gb to OpenSolaris. The other machine which I built before six months had OpenSolaris in one of the partition. It had windows server as the primary OS and OpenSolaris Grub as the boot manager. But when I installed Windows Server 2008 R2 as the primary OS on that machine it overwrote the Grub. So the Opensolaris partition is no more bootable. Anyways, I was not using that machine much. But the Optiplex machine is too slow and noisy. So I decided to have Opensolaris in my laptop as a Virtual Machine.

My Laptop is a WIn 7 and XP machine with 320 GB HDD and 3 GB RAM. I downloaded latest Sun Virtual Box. I already had the Open Solaris 2009.06 LiveCD which I had got from Sun months back. Within VirtualBox I created a new VM by allocating 16 GB HD and 1 GB RAM. I installed OpenSolaris as a VM and booted it. Initially, the Gnome GUI worked and now it doesn’t for no reason. I need to analyze the X logs. But I am ok with working in command line and the VM should be sufficient for me.

Quoted – Sun’s VirtualBox 3.1 Aims to Bag Enterprise Market – TechNewsWorld

Sun Microsystems has bumped its VirtualBox virtualization utility to 3.1 status. New features include a so-called teleportation ability, which lets users move a running VM between hosts on different OSes. Storage attachments are more flexible, and Sun says it’s made several performance enhancements.

“From a technical point of view, the teleportation feature creates virtual machines that have zero downtime during maintenance periods. This is a very big deal,” Scott Testa, a professor of business administration at Cabrini College in Philadelphia, told LinuxInsider.

Business Cues

The special attention that Sun Microsystems put into version 3.1 shows that it was deliberately aiming to capture the enterprise market, noted Testa.

For example, the new version has flexibility for use in a multiplatform work environment. For some businesses, not needing a homogeneous computing environment to deploy virtual machines is very important, he said.

The software works with Windows, Linux, Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) OS X, Solaris, and OpenSolaris.

http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/68777.html

Fault tolerance in virtualised environments doesn’t get more exciting than this, according to a recent vox pox in The Register.

I beg to differ. Rather than borrowing Trevor’s axe-based approach, I shall attempt to employ one of focus.

Fault tolerance can indeed be built into a virtualised environment such that availability is ensured. All it requires is an Ultra High Availability Server at the service layer with total duplication built in above.

It’s really that easy. Here’s a picture:

Adam suggests a cheaper alternative to fault tolerant hardware might be to invest in a blade frame and an even cheaper option, fault tolerant software.

Before going either of these routes, please consider this:

• Some fault tolerant hardware does not require coding so there are no related costs. Such hardware happens to be of the ultra high availability delivering species too. They also happen to reduce the cost of management and downtime.
• What about the costs of management, downtime and coding related to blade frames and software solutions?
• At what price do you value your reputation? Any outage requiring services to customers to be restarted on alternative servers, no matter how short lived, costs your customers time, money and in some cases lives. Downtime is simply not an option.

Trevor paints a great picture of Servers B and C coming to the rescue of Server A post an axe attack. Hang on though. Aren’t we forgetting who the victims are here?

Aren’t we forgetting about the customers who are unable to access the services on server A for the split moment it went down and whose customers’ livelihoods and in many cases quite literally lives, may have been at risk? If Server A had been truly fault tolerant then it wouldn’t have needed rescuing and there would be no victims.

These things aside, this vox pox does celebrate what we all know to be the best thing about virtualisation: flexibility. It’s great that recovery times are improving in the case of failure in a virtualised environment. For the greatest flexibility however, you need to ensure an environment where restarting is not necessary in the first place. Fullstop.

We are running a newly designed vSphere 4.0 environment connected to a very big LeftHand iSCSI environment. Lately we discovered some major problems with a couple of VM’s totally freezing for about 30 seconds, this problem seemed to only occur on several VM’s from one specific host, so time to do some research on this host.

The first fast conclusion I could make was that the vmkernel was flooded (multiple entries per second) with error messages coming from the Path Selection Policy (PSP).

Dec  2 15:41:13 esxhostname vmkernel: 0:00:37:21.082 cpu14:4118)WARNING: vmw_psp_rr: psp_rrSelectPath: Could not select path for device “naa.6000eb36b7210cc2000000000000017a”.
Dec  2 15:41:13 esxhostname vmkernel: 0:00:37:21.082 cpu14:4118)WARNING: NMP: nmp_IssueCommandToDevice: I/O could not be issued to device “naa.6000eb36b7210cc2000000000000017a” due to Not found
Dec  2 15:41:13 esxhostname vmkernel: 0:00:37:21.082 cpu14:4118)WARNING: NMP: nmp_DeviceRetryCommand: Device “naa.6000eb36b7210cc2000000000000017a”: awaiting fast path state update for failover with I/O blocked. No prior reservation exists on the device.
Dec  2 15:41:13 esxhostname vmkernel: 0:00:37:21.082 cpu14:4118)WARNING: NMP: nmp_DeviceStartLoop: NMP Device “naa.6000eb36b7210cc2000000000000017a” is blocked. Not starting I/O from device.
Dec  2 15:41:14 esxhostname vmkernel: 0:00:37:22.084 cpu0:4285)WARNING: vmw_psp_rr: psp_rrSelectPathToActivate: Could not select path for device “naa.6000eb36b7210cc2000000000000017a”.
Dec  2 15:41:14 esxhostname vmkernel: 0:00:37:22.084 cpu2:4231)WARNING: NMP: nmp_DeviceAttemptFailover: Retry world failover device “naa.6000eb36b7210cc2000000000000017a” – issuing command 0×4100010f2e40
Dec  2 15:41:14 esxhostname vmkernel: 0:00:37:22.084 cpu2:4231)WARNING: vmw_psp_rr: psp_rrSelectPath: Could not select path for device “naa.6000eb36b7210cc2000000000000017a”.
Dec  2 15:41:14 esxhostname vmkernel: 0:00:37:22.084 cpu2:4231)WARNING: NMP: nmp_DeviceAttemptFailover: Retry world failover device “naa.6000eb36b7210cc2000000000000017a” – failed to issue command due to Not found (APD), try again…
Dec  2 15:41:14 esxhostname vmkernel: 0:00:37:22.084 cpu2:4231)WARNING: NMP: nmp_DeviceAttemptFailover: Logical device “naa.6000eb36b7210cc2000000000000017a”: awaiting fast path state update…

Further conclusions at that moment learned that a volume was deleted from the LeftHand SAN and EXS obviously didn’t handle this well causing ALL VM’s on the troubled host to freeze completely. To the user it only appears like the server is losing its network connection but in fact it’s a real freeze that varies from 15 to 30 seconds (in our environment). So to get a grip on the situation I frozen (to stay in terms  all the LUN removals since I first wanted to reproduce this in our life-like test environment.

While troubleshooting this morning Arne Fokkema pointed me to an article Chad Sakac published yesterday which contains some interesting information about this topic, read it here.

For my test results I was using these steps on and on again:

• Healthy ESX Host with volume connected;
• From LeftHand Console: Unassign the iSCSI volume from the ESX Host (The iSCSI session towards the volume stays connected even after a rescan since the volume still exists and the iSCSI session isn’t terminated
• From LeftHand Console: Delete the volume
• The deletion of the volume is instantly detected by ESX and multiple entries are written to the vmkernel (*)
• Next thing is that every 5 minutes the Path Selection Policy (PSP) is mentioning that it can’t select a path for device (log: WARNING: vmw_psp_rr: psp_rrSelectPathToActivate: Could not select path for device “naa.6000eb36b7210cc2000000000000016e”.)

(*) Now the tricky part: when deleting a volume from the LeftHand console this is, as stated, recorded in the vmkernel log. Sometimes the log stays steady after the first entries (when the volume is deleted) and then randomly fills up with several entries about paths that cannot be found and other error messages and sometimes the log instantly floods and just keeps on flooding for hours, or even days!

My test results showed that the VMs freeze only in the last case: ‘whenever the vmkernel logs keeps on flooding’. At this moment it’s unclear to me why this is random behavior but looking back at our production problems versus all the volumes that we’ve deleted in the past and my experiences of today I cannot do anything else than really conclude that the “flooding vmkernel log” is at random. Needless to say is that the actual freezing of VMs (when the vmkernel log is flooded) is definitely at random since sometimes it occurs once an hour and sometimes multiple times an hour.

Last but not least, rescanning the vmhba solved my problems with the log flooding, however, rescanning the vmhba doesn’t always work anymore while the system is flooded!

So better be safe than sorry and follow the steps in the correct order when deleting a volume from the SAN (as apparently this is a multi-vendor and this ESX problem), just like Chad stated in his article.
First delete it from ESX, than from the SAN and finish with rescanning the vmhba. (another workaround is available for vSphere 4.0 Update 1)

Clearly I would love to hear other users’ experiences on this specific topic since I’m not quite happy with the “at random” experiences.

I’ve been a fan (and user) of VirtualBox for several years now for desktop virtualization, so it’s great to keep seeing updates with exciting new features added.

The latest version of VirtualBox delivers some compelling new features, including support for live migration and branched snapshots. Migration capabilities reflect VirtualBox's potential for ascending into the enterprise arena.

via VirtualBox 3.1 adds live migration and branched snapshots.

• Open VMware Infrastructure Client and connect to VirtualCenter or the ESX host
• Right-click the virtual machine
• Click Edit Settings
• Select Virtual Disk
• Increase the size of the disk and apply
• On the virtual machine go to Disk Management in the Storage section of the Computer Management program
• The disk size increase should now display as ‘Unallocated’

• Exit out of the DISKPART utility. If you check in the Disk Management utility you will also see that the previously unallocated space it gone and the disk is now larger

VMware Server può benissimo essere utilizzato come VMware Workstation e per giunta è GRATIS.
Vediamo come installarlo.

Installiamo i seguenti pre-requisiti:
sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`

Scarichiamo in binay previa registrazione al seguente LINK

Procediamo come segue per l’installazione:

tar xvf VMware-server-2.0.1-156745.i386.tar.gz
cd vmware-server-distrib
chmod +x vmware-install.pl
sudo ./vmware-install.pl

If VirtualBox opens fine, but when you try to start a virtual machine (VM) you get the following error:

Failed to start the virtual machine Windows XP.
VirtualBox can’t operate in VMX root mode. Please disable the KVM kernel extension, recompile your kernel and reboot (VERR_VMX_IN_VMX_ROOT_MODE).

… it means another virtualisation package – kvm – is interfering with VirtualBox. kvm isn’t installed on Ubuntu by default, so you probably installed qemu, the popular open-source emulator.

A quick fix is to stop kvm via the terminal:

sudo /etc/init.d/kvm stop

To stop this happening completely, mark the following packages for complete removal in Synaptic if they’re installed: kvm, qemu, qemu-kvm & qemu-launcher. Or you can do it via the terminal, and ignore errors regarding packages that weren’t installed (so can’t be uninstalled):

sudo apt-get remove kvm qemu qemu-kvm qemu-launcher

You should now be able to start your VM, without having to close and restart VirtualBox.

The hype machine has never been spinning this fast. With Google’s announcement of Chrome OS, people are claiming that this is yeat another step for Google to dominate your every day life. What’s next, Google Toilet paper. That will never happen!

Update: I stand corrected: Google Toilet Paper

Pushing the hype to the side, What Is Google Chrome OS??

From what we can tell right now, Chrome OS is a new light weight operating system targeted at the web and constructed to run on SSD (Solid State Drive) netbooks. Like Chrome (the browser) Chrome OS is designed to strip out all of the clutter and unnecessary processes that come standard with a normal machine and create a streamlined bare-bones environment. That cuts the boot time to a remarkable 7-10 seconds. So in basically 20 seconds (logging in) your ready to type in any url you please. Compare that to even a fast booting Mac: 20 seconds in, i still have a grey screen with an Apple logo.

Drinking the Koolaid, I decided to try out this revolutionary new product myself. The cool guys at GDGT have a download link posted and some instructions on how to get this thing up and running here.

Download the file and drop it Virtual Box (or VM Ware Fusion on Mac) and you’ve just successfully installed Chrome OS on your computer. It was that easy. (if you have an Easy Button, hit it now)

My synopsis: It’s slow. Yes, it is running in a VM, and i had a video streaming in the background, and it’s an early (VERY) dev build, but it’s still sluggish. Maybe I’m being a little to hard on the new Google Baby. Nah. Now that I’m on a roll, the things pretty ugly too. If Google want’s this thing to succeed, they need to at least pretend like they hired a capable designer to pretty it up.

Once you have it running, we want to hear your opinoin:

What do you think of Google Chrome OS?

(and the real question on everyones mind) What makes this different from Android?