Jayson Rowe’s Ramblings

VMware Server Tips’n'Tricks

7 Responses

1. 

   Mike, on July 22nd, 2008 at 9:12 am Said:

   Thanks for the tips! I recently moved a slew of aging home servers onto a couple VM servers, and have been looking for info on tweaking things for optimum performance. I’ll be giving all of these a try.

   Reply
2. 

   virendra, on August 5th, 2008 at 10:59 am Said:

   Hi,

   I have installed vmware workstation on windows xp (host machine) i have created
   Red hat 4.0 AS as guest, now when i try to telnet from host to guest it does not work
   also i have enabled telnet on the server.
   thanks in advance…
   v p

   Reply
3. 

   alex, on September 26th, 2008 at 2:30 pm Said:

   Have someone ever test some of these tips on VMWare Server 2 (RC or Beta version) ?

   Reply
4. 

   jaysonrowe, on September 26th, 2008 at 6:03 pm Said:

   Hi Alex,
   I have tested on VMware Server 2 (Beta), but not on RC or 2 RTM.

   I can assure you that they all will still apply, as I have used these methods on VMware Workstation 6.x which is what Server 2 is based on.

   HTH
   Jayson

   Reply
5. 

   Chris, on January 15th, 2009 at 10:45 am Said:

   I’ve spent many days doing tests (many times) of vmware host stability on Linux, and I have found only 1 distribution is stable: openSUSE 10.3 – all the others will give you OOM errors and crash the host if you’ve got a few VMs running for a few days, then start up 1 more.

   The problem seems to be the way all kernels (Except SUSE) handle the caching of disk to “spare memory”. When the cache “uses” it all up, all kernels (except SUSE) refuse to give it back to vmware, triggering the OOM killer to “take out” random host processes – usually always ending in a total crash.

   I’ve reported the problems to (at least) redhat and vmware several times over the last 2 years – none of them have fixed it yet. I tried about 10 different distros before I found SUSE is stable and stopped looking.

   Good luck!!

   p.s. all my machines are dual-xeon HP DL360 g4’s with 8gigs ram.

   Reply
   • 

     Ken, on May 9th, 2009 at 5:03 am Said:

     I installed Windows XP on multiple VMWare(s) hosted on CentOS. The VMWare(s) were bridge mode on the network card. The Remote Desktop Connection works from one WinXP to another WinXP within the host box. But I cannot get the Remote Desktop Connection work from outside into the box. They are all on the same sub-net. I can ping the WinXPs, and telnet the port 3389 and stay connected, too. Any help? Thanks in advance.

     Reply
   • 

     Tony, on July 22nd, 2009 at 12:58 pm Said:

     Hi,

     Well in fact, this issue occures when you try to allocate a very large amount of memory in very little time as the free memory is low. Launching a new VM while several ones are running is a good example

     As you say, kernel does has time to clean the cache in memory and memory allocation gets a oom… Kernel then invoques oom-killer to free some memory by killing a process (the biggest memory consumer process generally)

     The trick is to increase the minimum free memory in kernel parameters : sysctl -w vm.min_free_kbytes=65536 works great for RHEL4.

     Reply