Doing Development: Setting up VMware Server
This is the first part in what will be an ongoing set of articles on setting up and getting ready to do development. Before one begins to do any sort of development there needs to be somewhere to do it. With the advent of modern computers and the amazing amount of horsepower that they now contain virtualization makes a great way to set up a perfect, portable environment that gives a developer an incredible amount of control over their work environment.
There are many different virtualization options available now that processors support virtualization directly on the hardware and the aforementioned abundance of computing power. Linux and Windows users can choose from qemu, KVM, VirtualBox, VMware Player/Workstation/Server, Parallels and Xen (Windows misses out on KVM and Xen).
Out of that list, VMware has been in the virtualization business for a long time and as a result have wonderfully robust codebases for virtualization. It is because of this I will be setting up VMware Server, a free-as-in-beer product that allows a user to create virtual machines. The added benefit is that the end user can easily move this VM from machine to machine and even between VMware products.
Install Bugzilla The Easy Way
With more and more complex code coming along at work, one thing I wanted to get set up early was a bug-tracking software. Initially I tried to install Bugzilla on a few boxes, but always ran into issues trying to get it up and running. If it wasn’t perl modules not being found in CPAN for some odd reason, it was something else.
I ran across a virtual machine prebuilt with Bugzilla installed called Virtual Bugzilla Server, from ALM Works. Just download, extract, and run in VMWare Player or Workstation. If you are running ESX server 3.0 at work, the Virtual Bugzilla Server can be run through VMWare Converter and runs fine on ESX 3.0
OpenBSD 4.1 Does Not Work With ESX Server 2.5
Funny thing with OpenBSD 4.1 and VMWare ESX Server - they aren’t compatible. I tried installing OpenBSD in ESX under both the Other and FreeBSD and both times OpenBSD complained about seeing a duplicate IPv6 address on the network. Everything worked fine downloading packages and SSHing into the box. I set up Apache and started to test it.
Each page would work fine until 15kb was transferred. After that it stopped. Any pages over 15kb displayed fine, but anything (images, HTML, PHP, anything) would stop. I tested with wget and everything worked fine locally, but I kept hitting a 15kb barrier.
After much, much searching, I found out that that the virtual NIC causes a ton of packet collisions under OpenBSD due to the way it loops back to itself in VMware (hence the duplicate IPv6 address warning). It just so happened that in my case the packet collisions were so bad after 15kb of outbound traffic the packets stopped coming out.
I don’t know if this is still an issue in ESX 3, but OpenBSD works fine in VMWare Workstation 6. No go with ESX 2.5 though.
Update - 05/23/2007
According to Scott Lowe, this issue is resolved in ESX 3.0.1 . Thanks Scott!