One of the most important application I currently use for development, is Flash Professional 8.Therefore I need a virtualization tool, and I have used for some time VMWare-Server. The tool is really good, performance is good, easy to use, networking is easy,…There is just one major drawback, every time you install/upgrade to a new Kernel, you need to reconfigure the kernel modules for vmware-server. This could be automated…
However still is the best tool around(for me). VirtualBox seems to have made great progress in the last months, yo someday I will give it a try. I remember that I had some problems to setup VMWare-Server under Feisty, but this time the VMWare-Server VERSION 1.0.4 installed without additional patches.
To install VMWare-Server in Gutsy (ubuntu 7.10) be sure to get the version 1.0.4, because for version 1.0.3 you will have to install additional patches. Download the Archive and extract where you want.
Before you start the installation, we need to install additional packages:
sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r` xinetd
Then go to the extracted directory and run sudo ./vmware-install.pl and follow the instructions. For me I just followed the default values.
When you start a virtual machine, check if the clock is running too fast or too slow. My clock was running too fast. That's because VmWare-Server is not set to the correct speed of your CPU. I did so manually by adding to the /etc/vmware/config the following lines
host.cpukHz = 1830000
hostinfo.noTSC = TRUE
tools.syncTime = TRUE
Don'f forget to keep the VMWare-Tools up to date.
My VMWare guest OS clock also runs too fast, but not all the time. Just sometimes. I set my CPU frequency in the config like you (but for 2GHz) and then my guest OS clock ran too slow!
So I guess this works if the clock *always* runs fast in the guest OS, but if it’s an intermittent issue like I’m experiencing, then this solution will not fix that.
Still searching for something that makes my guest OS clock run correctly all of the time..
This seems to me that your CPU frequency changes(for example for powersave). That’s why sometimes it runs too fast and sometimes it runs too slow.
Now SD, which CPu do you have? And which value did you set instead of 1830000?
Try to set this value slighty above your real CPU frequency. For example instead of 2000000 try 2001000!
Thierry, I have a Core 2 Duo T7300 @ 2GHz in a Dell laptop. The guest OS actually keeps good time when it\’s not playing up, without having any CPU frequency set in the config. I suspect that\’s due to a working VMWare Tools installation in the guest OS which is periodically synchronizing time with the host system.
When I set the CPU frequency to 2001000, the guest OS clock runs slow again, I\’m having more success without setting any CPU frequency in the config (but of course this means I still haven\’t changed anything so still likely to have random clock speedup in guest OS).
1. Set the clock in /etc/vmware/config to your maximum CPU speed. This is recommended by VMware.
2. If the clock runs too slow, you can enable time synchronisation between the host and guest. This option is in VMware tools in the guest.
Time synchronisation only solves a slow clock problem, not the fast clock problem, so you might need to apply both.
Thanks GeWe. I discovered what I think is the cause of my fast clock. My host OS (Ubuntu Gutsy) has the CPU in “ondemand” throttling mode - I watched the CPU speed jump between 800MHz and 2GHz whilst doing various tasks.
When I start VMWare and the CPU is less than 2GHz, I get a fast clock in the guest OS.
I’ve tried manually setting the CPU frequency to max using various methods (e.g. using cpufreq-utils), but have not been able to do so, but am hoping to find a solution soon, so I can lock the CPU to 2GHz when I’m running VMWare.
In the meantime though, installed the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor widget in my application panel so I can see when my CPU has stabilised to 2GHz before I fire up VMWare.. so far this does the trick.
Oh, and Thierry you were right in saying: “This seems to me that your CPU frequency changes(for example for powersave).”
At the time though, I thought “Well no, I don’t use any kind of power saving thingy…” which, to my knowledge, I wasn’t. Turns out of course that Ubuntu was doing that anyway
Cheers!
Hi.
I get a disk spin-up error on any type of host.
Can you help?
Setup(dual amd opteron 240) 3gb ram- gutsy i386 (also tried amd64) and versiona 1.04 of vmware server free
Hi,
How many guest OS can be running at the same time in this 1.0.4?
Is any way we could increase it?
Tx
Jay