Month: September 2012

Categories
Tech

VMware Fusion 5 Black Screen

After upgrading to my version of VMware Fusion 4 to 5, I noticed upon VM boot none of my machines displayed any graphics except a black screen, essentially rendering them useless.

The quick fix for this I found is to dive into each ‘.vmware’ folder for each of your VM’s located by default in:

~/Documents/Virtual\ Machines.localized/

Right click Show Package Contents will display VM contents.

Open the related .vmx file in your favourite text editor, append the following line, then save and quit.

mks.gl.use32core = TRUE

Support article from VMware here

Categories
Tech

Set hostname (FQDN & short name) in CentOS 6.x

To update system short name. Edit /etc/sysconfig/network and update the HOSTNAME field to the desired short-name.

HOSTNAME=node1

To update the systems fully qualified domain name. Edit /etc/hosts and insert a new entry following the notation of (host_ip // FQDN // short-name).
In our example:

  • host_ip = 192.168.0.2 (Yours will be different)
  • FQDN = node1.mydomain.local
  • short-name node1
192.168.0.2 node1.mydomain.local node1
Categories
Tech

Convert VMware Fusion (.vmwarevm or .vmdk) VM’s to Xen

This technique allows you to convert VMware based VM’s across to the Xen Hypervisor (current version 4.1.3)

This step might be unnessaray for VM’s that don’t utilise sparse based virtual harddrives, but its best just to do it so everyone is at the same step. Find the vmware-vdiskmanager utility included with your VMware install.

On Mac for VMware Fusion this can be found at:

/Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmware-vdiskmanager

Or in some other versions

/Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/vmware-vdiskmanager

Change ‘cd’ into the relevant directory once found.
Consolidate the VMDK file

./vmware-vdiskmanager -r vm_to_be_converted.vmdk -t 0 temp.vmdk

Copy the temp VMDK across to the target Xen Hypervisor

scp temp.vmdk root@target_ip:/var/lib/libvirt/images

Once copied, use qumu-img to convert the VMDK file to a RAW format
qemu-img convert temp.vmdk -O raw /var/lib/libvirt/images/temp.img

Create a basic config file for the new VM

cd /etc/xen/new_vm_config

name = “new_vm”
memory = “256”
disk = [ ‘file:/var/lib/libvirt/images/temp.iso,hda,w’, ]
vif = [ ‘bridge=br0’, ]
bootloader=”/usr/bin/pygrub”
vcpus=1
on_reboot = ‘restart’
on_crash = ‘restart’

Boot up the new VM

xm create new_vm

You may find network may be unavailable, due to a change in MAC addresses assigned to the VM. Use virsh edit to find the current MAC address assigned to the VM, and update the network interface within the VM accordingly. Then reboot the VM or restart network services in order to re-establish network access.