A few clarifications about VMware Server and the Linux kernels

Linux Virtualization VMware
Friday, July 2nd 2010, 12:12
12 Comments

Since Ubuntu 9.04 appeared back in April, 2009, I’ve started building different scripts that use community supplied patches in order to make the install process of VMware Server as easy as it was supposed to be. Still it seems that many of the users of my scripts misinterpret the help I offered by asking questions which have nothing to do specifically with the scripts but with how VMware Server works. To be clear in this aspect: I do not provide support for any of VMware’s products.

When I began offering these scripts I simply tried to ease the process of installing VMware Server on various kernels shipped with the distribution I use. Considering to be a cumbersome job to manually apply patches or to start an install process, stop it in the middle, apply a patch and then continue the install, I thought that I could help by eliminating all these steps. The scripts are released with no kind of guarantee towards the success of using the product. Furthermore, it should be noted that VMware Server is not officially supported on Ubuntu > 8.04, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server  > 10.1, Mandriva Corporate Server > 4, Red Hat Enterprise Linux > 5.1 and two other less popular distributions.

Using VMware Server on any other distribution than the ones indicated above and in the “VMware Server User’s Guide” available here is solely your own responsibility. The only thing that I can guarantee to all of you using my scripts is the success of installing VMware Server on the unsupported kernels, a process which would fail without patching different files from the package. The fact that you might not be able to use all the server’s features is not my problem and unfortunately you don’t have an official way to obtain support.

A piece of advice that I might give to you is to not use VMware Server on unsupported kernels/distributions unless you are forced to. There are several other type 2 hypervisors which could do the job of providing virtual machines: QEMU, KVM, VirtualBox (which can be daemonized), etc.

In conclusion, if you have VMware Server related problems please do not ask me for support. If you have problems in using one of the scripts I wrote I would be more than happy to assist but that’s the only thing I am able and willing to do for you.

Thank you!

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12 Comments

  • Lourens July 15th, 2010 at 11:10

    Thank You!!!

    These scripts probably saved me days of work.

    I used it with Ubuntu 10.04 and it worked like a dream.

    Reply
  • aureli August 13th, 2010 at 16:36

    nice script, thanks…

    if visit Barcelona have a beer!

    Reply
  • Martin Groenholdt August 19th, 2010 at 13:28

    Thanks for the effort, this script works fine on Linux Mint 8.

    Reply
  • Sam September 2nd, 2010 at 14:04

    Gotta say I love this script.
    I run vmware server on my Ubuntu desktop and they seem to release a new kernel weekly lately… Makes the update next to painless.

    Reply
  • Jochen Axmann September 17th, 2010 at 14:05

    Hi,

    The script works perfect with Ubuntu 10.04. I wish there would be a script for Kernel 2.6.35 (Ubuntu 10.10). I´m testing 10.10 and miss my VM-Server :-(

    If you need help with testing…

    Greetings from Germany

    Jochen

    Reply
  • LinuxWarrior September 28th, 2010 at 09:00

    Hi

    Just have problems with Ubunutu 10.04_X64 and Kernel 2.6.32-25. It works fine with Kernel 2.6.32-22-server but after update to Kernel 2.6.32-25 and reboot. VMWARE Server would not start. It allways compains and requested a rerun of vmware-config.pl.
    When you run this command it run and it seems it completed normaly but when I reboot the maschine VMWARE will not start

    Any ideas ???

    Greetings from Germany

    Marcus

    Reply
    • Jochen September 28th, 2010 at 09:10

      do you also have installed the new kernel header files for 2.6.32-25 ? Without them the vmware-config.pl will fail.

      Reply
    • Mario September 30th, 2010 at 10:22

      1. I got it running with the new new 2.6.32-25 Kernel on Ubunu 10.04.1 LTS x64:
      Linux myserver 2.6.32-25-server #44-Ubuntu SMP Fri Sep 17 21:13:39 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux
      2. The vmware startup scripts is checking for a file called “not_configured”, if it exists vmware is not started, maybe you can check this.

      Greetings from Germany to Germany :)
      M.

      Reply
  • Bill November 4th, 2010 at 22:15

    I am stuck with the “there is no archive containing VMware server in the path you specified” error. I am using ubuntu 10.04 lts and created a directory /opt/vm to which I loaded the VMware-server archive and also the script. When I run the script using the ./***.install.sh it gives me the error. Now I know the files are in the same directory, is there something else I should be looking for?

    Reply
  • Florin November 27th, 2010 at 13:11

    > I *do not provide support* for any of VMware’s products. …
    Although you seemingly could make a business out of this :D

    Reply
  • Luca January 28th, 2011 at 10:18

    Radu, your scripts saved my day more than once. Many thanks for them.

    I have many happily working VMware Server 2.0.2 systems on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 32bit. But I’m now having difficulties with the same setup on x86_64… namely that more often than not network access to the physical host will completely hang. I suspect there’s something broken in vmnet.

    I still need to research the usability of a 32bit host system (Lucid and VMware) on these servers with 8GiB of ram… guests are not a concern since they’re all 32bit anyway.

    I’d be more than happy to move away from VMware but I also need something that a non-commandline-user could use to manage VMs on these headless servers… VirtualBox is attractive, but still an hack if we consider VBoxTool and phpVirtualBox. And AFAIK there is not any good management interface for libvirt (I’m looking at Xen and KVM mainly) on headless servers, at least without a full blown and complex cloud system.

    In other words, there’s simply nothing directly comparable to the good old VMware Server where you install a single package and have a good virt system completely manageable from the network :|

    I’m sure I’m not the only one looking for something like that, so any comment from other people who already had these problems would be really appreciated.

    Reply

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