for keeping track of my digital experiments

Yesterday I finished up some server setup research for this upcoming Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting project of mine. Hopefully within the month I will start leasing VPS’s. To do this, I needed a pretty stable and inexpensive control panel that will let users manage/re-image their VPS. None of the FOSS web managers had these two necessary capabilities that I need. So I went with HyperVM, a OpenVZ/Xen VPS web manager that I’ve seen in use by one of my hosting providers, Jadase. The only reason I stick with them is because I got grandfathered into the VPS 2 plan for $10/month. You can’t beat that! Well I will sure be able to beat out their VPS prices, I’ll be charging $13.50/month for the eqivalent of their VPS 2 plan.

Back to HyperVM. It is increadible easy to install on a CentOS 5.2 machine! Follow the HyperVM install instructions found here, once you have the physical box you want this to run on set up with a barebones CentOS 5.2 install. The install downloads about 1.1 GB of data, which is mainly the VPS templates for OpenVZ and Xen. HyperVM comes with a 5 VPS license built in (for testing), and licensing is really cheap and easy (compared to VMware ESX and Server 2003 Volume Licensing). HyperVM is USD $0.50/month per VPS.

I’ve tried rolling VMware server and workstation on OpenVZ nodes in the past, but I figured I’d give it a go again just for kicks. Still I was unable to get the proper kernel-headers to work with gcc to compile VMware server/workstation. The RPMs run just fine installing the components, but then compiling and installing the various compents (especially vmon) during the vmware-config.pl seems to fail time-and-time again. I just can’t get gcc to work with the custom OpenVZ kernel. I suppose it was never meant to be … two level of virtualization.

Prerequisites: clean Debian 5 installation (preferably from netinstall disc) on at least 1GHZ/512MB RAM, reliable Internet connection

I did the install over SSH, so that I don’t have to stand in front of my server rack. This experiment was conducted for a vmware server based virtual private server venture that I may be going in on with George Sawyer. He needed quickly deployable web environments for the classes he teaches.

Copy/Paste Code block

apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` libx11-6 libx11-dev x-window-system-core x-window-system xspecs libxtst6 psmisc build-essential xinetd gcc-4.1 g++-4.1
ln -sf /usr/bin/gcc-4.1 /usr/bin/gcc
wget http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmserver/VMware-server-1.0.9-156507.tar.gz
tar xzvf VMware-server-1.0.9-156507.tar.gz
cd vmware-server-distrib/
./vmware-install.pl
[ !-- follow the instructions. the defaults should be just fine. --! ]
cd ..
wget http://vraidsys.com/software/vmware-update-2.6.26-5.5.7.tgz.gz
tar -xzvf vmware-update-2.6.26-5.5.7.tgz.gz
cd vmware-update-2.6.26-5.5.7
./runme.pl
[ !-- follow the instructions. the defaults should be just fine. --! ]
cd ..
rm -fdr /tmp/*
rm -fdr vmware*
rm -fdr VMware*
shutdown -r now


Edited July 30, 2009

Here is what just happened:
1) all the dependencies were installed first
2) then a system link was created so that the old version of gcc is used that is compatible with the kernel headers
3) the vmware server software is downloaded and installed.
4) you should reach a point in the installation where the process errors out installing the vmmon module.
5) use the patcher to override some dependency stuffs that can’t be fixed.
6) once the process is done, remove the installation files, and then restart the system to free up the memory used by the installation procedure.

This will get vmware going on your Debian 5 box.

add “contrib non-free” after “main” to the various lines in your /etc/apt/sources.list file

before running the vmware installer, do some dependency installs: apt-get install gcc g++ make perl psmisc linux-headers-`uname -r`

download from: https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/p/download.php?p=workstation-l. login or register then select your download. I suggest installing via the rpm, in which case: apt-get install alien.

converting the rpm to a deb takes about 15 minutes, but it is easier than installing from a tarball (.tar.gz).
alien --to-deb --scripts [vmware-rpm-name].rpm
after about 1-5 minutes should output a deb file
at which point run the command: dpkg -i [vmware-pkg-name].deb
take another 5-10 minutes to install all the files

start via vmware command, be sure to be connected via vnc or in some sort of X-Window environment.