VMware and NetBSD

[Null Void]

Hi. Anybody have any experience running NetBSD or Dfly under VMware? I found these appliances that I want to run in my office but it says that the "VMware tools" have not been installed on them:

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/636
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/637

I contacted the author and he claims that Vmware does not officially support NetBSD and that's why it doesn't release the "VMware tools" for that OS. It only supports Linux and FreeBSD from the open source world. Is that true? Is there any performance gain (CPU, I/O) from installing the VMware tools on the guest system? I've heard numerous reports of improved performance but nothing has been confirmed officially by VMware. Thanx much.

[k***@azeotrope.org]

While I don't use it for any heavy-duty work (just occasional builds
of NetBSD), I have a NetBSD virtual machine running under VMWare 5.5.3
(Windows XP x64 host OS), and haven't had any problems with it. In terms
of performance, I think X is what benefits the most from having the
VMWare tools installed, but XFree86 and X.org come with a vmware video
driver--you don't need the VMWare tools to get that. I do occasionally
wish that hgfs worked with NetBSD (to be able to mount a portion of the
host filesystem in the guest OS), but smbfs works fine for me, since I
have networking enabled.

[Peter Eisch]

I have one instance running spam filtering in production and it works fine.
I'm looking at moving more off bare metal into vmware server instances.
I've had no issues once the pcn driver is patched.

peter

[John Darrow]

Post by Null Void
Hi. Anybody have any experience running NetBSD or Dfly under VMware?
I found these appliances that I want to run in my office but it says
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/636
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/637
I contacted the author and he claims that Vmware does not officially
support NetBSD and that's why it doesn't release the "VMware tools"
for that OS. It only supports Linux and FreeBSD from the open source
world. Is that true? Is there any performance gain (CPU, I/O) from
installing the VMware tools on the guest system? I've heard numerous
reports of improved performance but nothing has been confirmed
officially by VMware. Thanx much.

With a couple of hacks to get around its attempts to check the FreeBSD
kernel module loader, you can get the FreeBSD version of the tools
running under NetBSD's compat_freebsd code. (I also tried the linux
version, but it had far too many dependencies on linux's nonstandard
ways of doing things)

The things provided by VMware tools are:
- a special X server to improve graphical performance
- some X apps to control certain VMware settings from within your guest

I've never found either of these useful, as I've never had any reason
to run X on guest servers (it seems a major waste of memory and
processor to me). The X apps simply duplicate functionality already
found in the VirtualCenter (which you will be wanting to run somewhere
anyway).

- a kernel module for memory allocation, allowing a guest to "give
back" previously-used memory to the server.

This is a binary kernel module, and thus there's no way to use it on
NetBSD. However, it only comes into play if you overcommit memory on
your server, which is a bad idea in the first place.

- a heartbeat tool (lets the server know your guest is alive)
- tools to allow the server to cleanly shutdown or restart your guest
from the VirtualCenter

These are the things that are actually useful for NetBSD.

Please note that the most recent ESX version of VMware I saw didn't
include FreeBSD tools; fortunately, I still had a disk image from an
earlier GSX version that had them. While that meant that
VirtualCenter always claimed the tools "need upgrade", they still
worked just fine.

jdarrow

[Peter Eisch]

Post by John Darrow
...
I've never found either of these useful, as I've never had any reason
to run X on guest servers (it seems a major waste of memory and
processor to me). The X apps simply duplicate functionality already
found in the VirtualCenter (which you will be wanting to run somewhere
anyway).
...

This is a good point that I missed emphasizing in my earlier reply. At
"work" I have the experience to be around about 30 instances running linux.
None of the clients have the vmware tools installed. With vmware
workstation 4 we had significant clock skew issues in the client instances
which were managed by running ntp from cron every minute and slaved to a
local server. (ntpd failed to keep sync) I haven't seen this issue with
vmware server at all.

The other detail worth noting is that I set the host's configuration "Fit
all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM." If you don't select
that, bad things happen, as John noted.

peter

[Brendon Costa]

At work we use VMWare workstation running under Windows XP hosting i386
NetBSD (At home I use VMWare player on Windows XP 32 bit hosting hosted
NetBSD amd64).

We have been using this setup for a few years and have had no serious
issues. Something that may be helpful is a set of tools found at:

http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/index.html

These are released under an open source liscence (I have not checked to
see if they are in pkgsrc) and provide similar functionality to the
vmware tools. Since I had problems with ntpd keeping the clock in sync
(It fails to update the time when it varies too much from the time
server which occurs after pausing the virtual machine) I setup a cron
job that uses the above tools to sync the time with my host windows
machine.

Anyhow, I hope that can help a little.

Brendon.

[TlorD]

Post by Null Void
Hi. Anybody have any experience running NetBSD or Dfly under VMware?

I use NetBSD daily under vmware server (the free edition).
I have configured the VM as a freebsd and installed freebsd's command
line tool painlessly.
The freebsd VM setting makes vmware manage idle time correctly, and the
command line manages heartbeat, startup/shutdown scripts and GUI
buttons, which is pretty much all I need.

HTH :)