Savannah W-ITS

Since the VMware install under Fedora 9 was problematic and since there are other kernel related problems (random seg-faults with Fedora 9) I decided to try VMware under Fedora 8 (2.6.26.5-28.fc8.) The now familiar install process went smoothly. In less than 10 minutes the install was completed, and the VMs created under Vista were installed and ready for use.

It should be noted that VMware Server 2.0 does NOT explicitly list Fedora as a supported OS for VMware Server 2.0; while the install seemed to be ‘normal’, I could not get all of the required processes to run and I could not logon to the web console. I also could not locate any error messages pointing me to a solution.

This seems to be a topic of interest so here is a bit more information about using Cobbler to provision Linux systems under VirtualBox. The steps are fairly simple and allow you to use virtual NICS to reach your Cobbler server. To use this information you need: a) a system with an operating Cobbler install and b) Linux VMs configured within VirtualBox.

I first looked at virtualization several years ago – it was beyond, or rather the hardware was beyond my exploration budget so I moved on. Current PCs under ~$1000 are quite capable of running multiple OS instances (especially with new VM-aware CPUs and an adequate amount of RAM and disk space; my 6 GB system can run a primary OS using ~1GB or less of RAM (under Linux) and ~2GB of RAM (under Vista.)

After flipping between Vista (64 bit) and Fedora 8/9 I find that:

• Virtual Box under Vista integrates well but performance is somewhat less robust than when running similar VMs under Linux;  but hardware issues (specifically USB device sharing) seem to work well under Vista.
• Creating an NTFS native partition (or two) is quite useful if there is a need to share data across OS instances or when running under different primary hosts

Hmm, remember the 3 B’s? (backup! backup! backup!)

During my exploration of Cobbler, Virtual Systems (Xen, Qemu, Virtual Box, others) and various Linux distrobutions I used my laptop which also contained a native XP install. Things went really well using Cobbler to setup various types of Kickstart files (full install, just a base install, web server install, etc.)

At some point I used the wrong option (in a kickstart file) for disk

Cobbler – a provisioning system for Linux or other OS builds

Virtual Box – A virtual machine (VM) management suite (packaged by Sun)

Just a few years ago the hardware in computer systems (PCs and servers) tended to contain quite a number of proprietary components which required special treatment/drivers/setup-configuration to create a functional and useful system.  The build process tended to be time consuming and was typically customized based