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Sometime after I get back to Kentucky, I’m thinking of building a server for running virtual machines using VMware Server 2.0. The idea is to virtualize as many of my machines as possible.  Virtual servers, in particular, benefit from this by being able to be easily moved or cloned.  Rather than having to take a server down for upgrades, you have the  ability to clone the VM, apply the upgrade to the clone, then switch them out, resulting in nearly zero downtime.

In addition to running web and mail servers, I could also virtualize the backends to some other applications, namely Deluge and MythTV, so that the computers they ran on didn’t need to be on 24/7.  MythTV is a little tricky due to the lack of support for PCI passthrough in VMware, but I could of course use USB tuners.  I could also use a virtual machine as my primary desktop, and use a small, low powered, thin client to access it over VNC or SSH.

I recently looked into the hardware I’d want for such a server and came up with the following:

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz CPU
• Intel BOXDG31PR Micro ATX Motherboard
• Kingston 4GB (2×2GB) DDR2-800 Memory
• Seagate 1TB SATA2 Hard Drive
• APEX DM-387 Slim Micro ATX Case

The build would be another slim micro ATX build, similar to Cervantes and have a quad-core CPU, 4GB of ram, and a terabyte of storage.  In total, it came to a little under $600 for the entire build (I love how cheap hardware is getting) but I think I’ve decided to hold out for Nehalem before I build it.  With native quad cores and hyper threading, Nehalem should work well for this kind of project.

Today I had my “Poster Session” at VMware.  All interns are expected to create a poster showcasing what they had done over the summer, so mine focused mostly on VDI and VDM.  I was suprised at the attention that my poster attracted, as several people stopped by to ask me questions about the project.  Mine was one of the projects that had a more obvious application, versus other projects that would be considered mostly “under the hood” improvements.

The interns whose posters receive the most votes get a free trip to VMWorld, this September in Las Vegas.

Today I played around with a recent experimental build of VMware Workstation 6.5.  I installed Steam and downloaded Counter Strike: Source and Half Life 2: Lost Coast (Two apps with benchmarking utilities).

CS:S ran pretty well at the default settings, and got an average of 35fps for the stress test.

Lost Coast, however, managed to completely crash the virtual video card, I’m giving it another go now.  I’m guessing that HDR was too much for the virtual machine to handle.

Well, LC is clearly unhappy, it’s refusing to start now…

And now CS:S won’t start either, great.  Time to do some debugging…

So, after I posted my method for building and testing XPe images in Workstation, I was asked to get my XPe VMs working in ESX as well.  ESX uses an older version of VMware’s Virtual Hardware, so XPe VMs I created with my previous method will not run if transferred directly to an ESX machine.

Creating the virtual hardware component is pretty straightforward, and follows the same general process as my previous guide.  For your convenience, I’ve uploaded my component that I created running XP on ESX.

vmware4.sld

However, just the component isn’t enough for ESX.  ESX 3.x doesn’t support virtual IDE hard drives.  Likewise, Windows XPe doesn’t support SCSI drives.  So, you’ll have to install the VMware SCSI driver.  During a normal XP installation, you can do this by pressing F6 during installation and loading the drivers from a floppy, but because you build XPe rather than installing it, you have to componetize the driver.  Again, I’ve already done this for you.

vmscsi.zip

If this doesn’t work for you, you can download the floppy image containing the driver from VMware.com, extract it, and then import the vmscsi.inf file into the XPe Component Designer.

Once you have both the vmware4 and vmscsi components added to your XPe profile, run dependency checks to pull in the required components and build the image like you did in the last guide.  After that, move the Virtual Machine onto your ESX box (assuming you didn’t create it there) and fire it up.

XP Embedded Studio isn’t actually a horrible application at it’s core.  Now, the user interface and documentation are God-awful, which is why I’m writing this post.  As you saw in my last two entries, I’ve been working with XPe for the last few days, and there has been plenty of frustration to go along with it.  What should have been a fifteen minute task wound up taking several days.  However, one week and a few dozen BSODs later, I present this how to:
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Cervantes is back online, at least for the time being.  I’m going to take this opportunity to write a few things.  So much has happened since my last post.

Obviously, the main thing is my internship.  I’m now almost three weeks in, and I’m loving every minute of it.  The campus is downright amazing, and the weather in Palo Alto is beautiful.  I’m getting to work exclusively in Linux, and using GTK+.   I’m really starting to like coding in C/C++ now that I’m doing something useful with it.  My first paycheck has come and gone, but on the upside, I’ll have a place to live for the rest of the month.

My Thinkpad T61p has been holding up great, and has handled everything I’ve thrown at it easily.  That said, there’ll soon be available upgrades that I could consider, including 8GB of RAM and a Quad Core 2.5GHz CPU.  But at around $1000 each, I don’t think I’ll be getting either any time soon.  But, I can dream.

In the world of tech, some other goodies have been announced.  One of these is the ASUS Eee PC 901 and 1000, the newest in ASUS’s line of subnotebooks, at 9 and 10 inches, respectively.  The new generation of Eees uses Intel’s new Atom platform, including a CPU clocked at 1.6GHz, a notable improvement over the previous Celeron processor.  The new notebooks are also rated for up to nearly 8 hours of battery life.  A few days after the Eee announcement came the Canonical’s unveiling of Ubuntu Netbook Remix, a custom version of Ubuntu designed for small, Atom based netbooks like the Eee.  I’m really wanting to try it out on an Eee PC 1000.

Also, a few short days ago, Barack Obama clinched the Democratic nomination after the final two primaries, meaning he’ll be going up John McCain in the fall.  I’m very excited about this, as Obama is the first candidate in my short lifetime that I’ve actually been able to get excited about, and I’m hoping that this campaign will ultimately change the way the political system works in this country.

A few months ago, I received an email from a recruiter at VMware. That email was one of those rare moments where my life almost went down a completely different path. I had signed up for so many free trials of VMware Workstation over the years, that I was used to getting emails from them, and when this one popped into my mailbox, I disregarded it. Fortunately for me, however, the sender made a small mistake. He had misread the name of my college, and so a few minutes later, I got a short, one line email that read:

“Sorry I just noticed that you are at the University of Louisville and not Louisiana.”

Having no idea what this was referring to, I looked back in my inbox and noticed the previous email from the same sender. It turned out that he had found out about me from my work on Deluge, and that VMware was looking for programmers with GTK+ experience.

After a series of emails and a few interviews, I wound up with an internship for this summer, and this morning I landed in San Francisco, ready to start work on Monday.  Their San Francisco office is just a mile down the road, well within walking distance.

I spent some time today exploring the city, going a few blocks in either direction on Market St.  I saw a lot of interesting things, and took some pictures that I’ll try to post later (at the moment they’re up on Facebook).  The city has a very Mediterranean feel to me, and reminds me a bit of my trip to Spain several years ago.