Desktop Virtualization

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Boot your VMware Windows VMs in VirtualBox

I'm pretty sure I have mentioned it in one of the VirtualBox announcement posts: if you have an existing VMware VM disk image with your OS installed in it, you don't even have to convert it when you switch to Sun xVM VirtualBox.

Booting VMware VMs with Windows hangs in VirtualBox

VirtualBox natively supports VMware VMDKs, but so far I was unable to boot any of the Windows XP VMware VMs in VirtualBox – only a few seconds after being turned on, the VM will seemingly hang even though I/O icon in the statusbar of it will indicate some traffic.

Turns out, it's a well known problem, and there's a very simple solution to it explained on the Migrate existing Windows installations to VirtualBox page of the Virtualbox wiki.

Advanced VirtualBox settings: IO APIC

Basically, pre-installed Windows images fail to boot up in VirtualBox because of the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) problems.

There are a few versions of HAL supplied with each Windows:

  • Standard HAL
  • ACPI HAL
  • ACPI HAL with IO APIC support

They are supplied in a form of 3 different DLLs, and only one is picked based on your hardware configuration at the time of a Windows install. Because VMware supports IO APIC in VMs by default, that defines the HAL version used in your Windows VM.

VirtualBox is a bit smarter: IO APIC is disabled by default due to expensive (CPU-wise) virtualization. That's why, by default, your newly created VirtualBox VM will not boot a VMware image with Windows pre-installed.

Still, the IO APIC option is here, so you can just enable it for your VirtualBox VM to make the Windows image work.

This screenshot (click the thumbnail to see it in full resolution) shows what you need to do.

VirtualBox IO-APIC Settings

That's it – this trick has really helped me, and I sure hope it helps you. Stay tuned for more VirtualBox tips!

See also:

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Planet V12n!

If you haven't heard about Planet V12n before, it's an initiative by the VMTN to aggregate all the virtualization blogs they can find. There's also a Planet VMware aggregator for VMware-only blogs.

Last week, Desktop Vitualization blog was added to the Planet V12n list, and I'm really proud to join the rest of great blogs already featured there. Thanks for adding me to the list! And to all the new readers of this blog – welcome and thanks for stopping by, hope to see your comments!

Head over to the VMTN blog to look at the full list of participating blogs, it's an excellent way to learn more about the virtualization community.

For Unix how-tos and tips, please check out my Unix Tutorial blog and Unix Tutorial digest.

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VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit

Last week saw a rather interesting release: a VDDK – Virtual Disk Development Kit by VMware, which seems to be a complete toolset for working with VMware VMDK disk images and coding your own applications which interface with them.

Virtual Machine Disk Format (VMDK image specification) is used by many vendors, and so such an SDK from VMware is a great way to reinforce VMDK position on the market.

What is VMware VDDK?

Virtual Disk Development Kit is essentially the following three things:

  • VMDK disks mount utility (mounting Windows or Linux partitions directly from VMDK images)
  • VMDK disks management utility (growing VMDK images and changing their type, even shrinking VMDK images under certain conditions)
  • VMDK Virtual Disk API – a programmatic interface to access VMDK images from your applications

[Read more…]

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VMware Server 2.0 beta 2

VMware Server 2.0

Last Friday saw the long-awaited release of VMware Server 2.0 beta 2, Build 84186.

New features in VMware Server 2.0 beta 2

VMware website highlights the following new features of this VMware Server 2.0 release:

  • Updated VMware Infrastructure (VI) Web Access management interface: With the faster performance, improved stability and broader range of configuration options, the VI Web Access management interface provides a simple, flexible, intuitive and productive management experience. In addition, embedded help files are context sensitive based on the task being performed.
  • Independent virtual machine console: With the new VMware Remote Console, you can access your virtual machine consoles independent of the VI Web Access management interface plus resize the virtual machine console windows as needed.
  • Support for USB 2.0 devices: Transfer data at faster data rates from USB 2.0 devices.
  • Multi-tiered permissions: Configure different levels of permissions to access virtual machines in different ways, including browsing, interacting, configuring and administering virtual machines.
  • New hardware editors: Edit and add devices such as USB 2.0 devices and legacy devices such as floppy drives, serial and parallel ports.
  • Automatically start your virtual machines: Select which virtual machines that you want to automatically start when VMware Server starts. In addition, there is also an option to boot the virtual machine directly into the BIOS Setup Screen.
  • Link to Virtual Appliance Marketplace: Access thousands of pre-built, pre-configured, ready-to-run enterprise applications packaged with an operating system inside a virtual machine. This speeds up time to value and simplifies software development, distribution, and management.

[Read more…]

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Failed to allocate page for guest RAM error in Linux VMware Workstation

I've been spending increasingly more time researching topics for Unix Tutorial on one of my desktops. Ubuntu has replaced the Windows Vista I had and so far I quite like the experiment. Out of the box, all of the hardware was properly supported and even the NTFS partitions left from Vista install are easily available.

One of the first things I've decided to install was the trial version of the latest VMware Workstation: 6.0.3 build-80004. And although it installed without a problem, when I tried to run one of the previously created virtual machines, I got the following error:

VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0)
Failed to allocate page for guest RAM!

As it turned out after a quick investigation, that was a result of running a VM from a NTFS partition, because its default mounting settings don't have the exec option.

Since you shouldn't be running anything critical through an NTFS driver anyway, I simply moved the VM onto one of the ext3 partitions and, sure enough, it fixed the guest RAM allocation error.

Update: if your scenario prevents you from moving a VM to a native partition, use the following option:

mainmem.UseNamedFile = "FALSE"

You should add it to the vmx file of your VM. Thanks for the tip, benito!

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Critical security vulnerabilities fixed in VMware's hosted products

Many of you have probably heard about the recent Core Security findings which resulted in a security advisory CORE-2007-0930, Path Traversal vulnerability in VMware's shared folders implementation:

A vulnerability was found in VMware's shared folders mechanism that grants users of a Guest system read and write access to any portion of the Host's file system including the system folder and other security-sensitive files. Exploitation of these vulnerability allows attackers to break out of an isolated Guest system to compromise the underlying Host system that controls it.

Successful exploitation requires that the Shared Folder's feature to be enabled which is the default on VMware products that have the feature AND at least one folder of the Host system is configured for sharing.

[Read more…]

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VMsafe – new virtual security technology from VMware

I'm just back from VMworld Europe 2008, and one of the highlights of this event was the announcement of VMsafe – a new security technology introduced by VMware.

What is VMsafe?

VMsafe is a new security technology. What is means is that software security vendors will partner with VMware to develop custom virtual appliances used for protecting virtual machines on a VMware ESX server.

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How To Convert VMware Server 2.0 Beta VMs into VMware Server 1.0.4

I've just finished the first round of VMware Server 2.0 beta testing, and although I quite like the product, it's still not stable enough for my needs, and so I've decided to fall back to VMware Server 1.0.4.

But what happens is that every time you try to use the VMware Server 2.0 virtual machine in VMware Server 1.0.4, you get an error like this:

VMware Server Console error message

"Configuration file was created by a VMware product with more features than this version" may be a correct statement, but chances are that you won't need any of the new features of VMware Server 2.0 to use standard VMs.

Because of this, you can use a simple hack to make the new VMs work with older version of VMware Server: simply change the hardware version back.

[Read more…]

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