I upgraded my vmware machine from vmware 1.3 to vmware 2.0 beta. The install
process was great by comparison to the last two releases. This install was much
nicer than the previous one for simple reasons that I didn't have to hack the
perl script to not misbehave, and I didn't have to mess around compiling or
finding my own vmware kernel modules. Everything Just Worked during the
install.
On the downside, vmware-server-console is deprecated. Vmware Server 2.0 uses
Vmware Infrastructure, which appears to be tomcat+xmlrpc and other things. The
New Order seems to be that you manage your vms with the webbrowser, which isn't
a bad idea. However, we must remember that Good Ideas do not always translate
into Good Implementations.
The web interface looks fancy, but the code looks like it's from 1998. The
login window consists of layers and layers of nested tables and a pile of
javascript all in the name of getting the login window centered in the browser.
You can see the page align itself upon rendering even on my 2gHz workstation
with Firefox. Horrible.
Once you log in, you're presented with a
visually-useful-but-still-runs-like-shit interface. The interface itself
appears useful and nice, but again fails to respond quickly presumably due to
the piles of poorly written javascript involved.
Since VMware thought this was a fresh install, it didn't know about any of my
old virtual machines. Adding them using the web interface causes vmware to
crash. Oops. So, I found a vmware infrastructure client executable randomly in
the package; "find ./ -name '*.exe'" will find it for you. Copied this to my
windows box and installed it. I used this tool to re-add my old vmware machines.
Unfortunately, "raw disks" are disabled in this free version of vmware server.
I'm not sure why. My Solaris VM uses raw disks for its zfs pool, so this was a
problem. Luckily, this is purely a gui limitation and not a vmware limitation.
To repair my Solaris VM, I created a new virtual machine with the same features
and told it where it's first disk lived (the first disk was a normal
file-backed vmware disk image). After that, I looked at the old vm's .vmx file
and copied in the lines detailing the raw drives to the new .vmx file:
scsi0:1.present = "true"
scsi0:1.filename = "zfs-sdb.vmdk"
scsi0:1.deviceType = "rawDisk"
scsi0:2.present = "true"
scsi0:2.filename = "zfs-sdc.vmdk"
scsi0:2.deviceType = "rawDisk"
Everything's backup and running sanely now in vmware. Hurray :)