Why

VMWare allows you to run virtual machines on your KnoppMyth system, allowing you to take full advantage of the machine running 24/7 by adding additional server capabilities without having to install them on the KnoppMyth system itself.

The KnoppMyth system is not designed for security and any additional installations have to be reinstalled and reconfigured every time you upgrade KnoppMyth. Installing additional software to KnoppMyth can be risky, destabilizing your system.

With VMWare, when you upgrade KnoppMyth you can simply reinstall VMWare Server software and restart the virtual machines you previously created, keeping the KnoppMyth otherwise in its default state.

For more background, browse the articles on howtoforge and techrepublic, or do a search (those links are starting to get a little old).

Installation

Note R5E50 requires the kernel source, partially built. See this previous version of this page for instructions.

• Go to the http://www.vmware.com/download/server,
• register for a free activation key (no fields are verified, valid email not required)
• download the .tar.gz server for linux, and the web management interface (the 'mui', optional).
• Untar the packages (tar zxvf *.tar.gz), go into the extracted directories, run vmware-install.pl for server and then mui. Mostly, you can accept defaults
• Run: /etc/init.d/openbsd-inetd restart if it complained to you about inetd in the installation.
• To then use the management web interface, you browse to port 8333 on your knoppmyth box, e.g. https://192.168.1.10:8333.
• From the management interface, you can start/stop virtual machines, and it offers you a link to download a server console, from which you can create new virtual machines, select existing ones, and start/stop them.

Username will be root and password will be your root password.

VM Priority

With VMWare Server 1.x, A very good idea is to lower the priority of the vmware processes, so they don't interfere with the running of KnoppMyth. The default "niceness" priority of vmware is -10 (lower number, less "nice", higher priority), the same as the video capture priority, and we don't want that. If your VM needs a high priority, then KnoppMyth is not the place to host it. VMWare Server 2.x seems to set the priority to 0, which isn't so bad.

One way to achieve this is by putting an executable file, say vmware_priority in /etc/cron.hourly containing:

#!/bin/sh
renice 10 `pidof vmware-vmx`

Make sure to run chmod +x vmware_priority . Execute it with ./vmware_priority to check you got it right by running top and checking the NI (niceness) column.

Alternatively, remember to run that command every time you reboot or start a vm.

Note, that script will fail if you don't have any VMs - in which case something more sophisticated is required.

The niceness of 10 is pretty arbitrary here. I found 20 was too low for running a slimserver VM, and 10 seems to work fine.

What next

Rather than create new virtual machines, you may wish to download virtual appliances (very cool). If you want to create a minimal server, the Ubuntu Server appliance here is a good starting point. One of the first things you'll want to do from the console is edit /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts, and apt-get install openssh-server so you can ssh to your VM.

Questions?

Here's a forum post on the subject, ask here.

Ideas

You might want to create:

• Mail/web server
• bittorrent server (e.g. with web-based Torrentflux and moblock anti-p2p IP blocker)
• slimserver or other music server
• ever wanted to try Ruby on Rails or run a LAMP server? There are fully featured preconfigured appliances to download that work straight out of the box.