virtualbox – Geek 2.0

Solving VMWare Crashes on Linux SMP Kernels

Sébastien Stormacq — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 13:59:36 +0000

I am writing this blog entry as a note to myself, to keep track of this issue and, more importantly, the solution I found.

Problem Statement:

When running VMWare Player or Workstation on a Linux host, with multiple processors (or cores), on a 64 bits kernel, VMWare Player and Workstation keep crashing with error

vcpu-0:ASSERT vmcore/vmm/main/irq.c:100 bugNr=2293

Root Cause:

After some Googling and searching VMWare’s Knowledge Base, I found this article referring to an issue with Non Maskable Interrupts (NMI) in Linux Kernels 2.4 and later.

It appears that Suse and RedHat Linux have this setting enabled by default, as shown by

$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/nmi_watchdog
 1

Workaround:

Disable NMI watchdog.

At runtime, by typing (as root)

echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/nmi_watchdog

At boot time, by modifying Grub configuration by adding

nmi_watchdog=0

to the

kernel

line in

/boot/grub/grub.conf

and reboot

Interesting side note : this also solves my problem of running these VMWare create virtual machines under VirtualBox

Enjoy !

Installing VBox Guest Additions in a minimal Oracle Enterprise Linux config

Sébastien Stormacq — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 15:01:48 +0000

Here is a tip to help you to save some time next time you will install Oracle Enterprise Linux as a guest OS in a Virtual Box system.

If, like me, you like to install the minimum set of components and then add whatever is required at a later stage, you will soon find that you can not install the Virtual Box Guest Additions : the installation procedure will complain for missing packages.

Actually, the installation procedure is compiling source code, hence it requires some development tools and the kernel header files. None of these are installed by default when you choose a minimal installation.

First Step : add Oracle repositories to YUM configuration (as root)

cd /etc/yum.repos.d
wget http://public-yum.oracle.com/public-yum-el5.repo

Then ensure that the repositories are enabled, i.e. enabled=1 under [ol5_u5_base] and [el5_u5_base]

Second Step : install missing packages

sudo yum install gcc  make  automake  autoconf kernel-headers.i386 kernel-devel

Then you can proceed with normal VirtualBox Guest Additions installation.

Enjoy !

An easy way to evaluate Oracle SOA / BPM offering

Sébastien Stormacq — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 14:09:23 +0000

One of the big pain when willing to evaluate the SOA or BPM offering from Oracle is the installation process. These are not simple toys to play with, they require some hundreds of Mb to download and some patience to carefully install all components and their dependencies.

Unless you have a good tutorial or book at hands, the result is likely to fail, believe me. I’ve been there, I’ve done that.

The good news, is that we are helping you out by providing Virtual Machines images, ready to run and pre-installed with all the software you will need : the database, the application server, the SOA suite with BPM and BAM.

Patience is only required during the 6Gb download now.

Be sure to have the latest version of Virtual Box installed on your machine and a few Gbs (2-3 at least) available for the virtual machine.

Enjoy !

Virtual Box in Headless Mode, RDP, Sun Rays, Mac ….

Sébastien Stormacq — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:00:00 +0000

I am at SIBOS this week, on Sun’s booth, demonstrating our Open Suite for Swift Solution to customers and prospects.

The demo has been prepared by Patrice in a Virtual Box image and requires significant resources to run as it includes, Java CAPS, Directory Server, Oracle XE, Microsoft MQ, Websphere MQ etc …

Our initial plans was to install that demo on our booth’s Sun Ray server but the machine was not sized appropriately to handle a dozen Sun Ray clients running Star Office, Firefox and, at the same time, our huge Swift demo VM.

The solution was :

Start the VM on my own laptop, in headless mode (my laptop acting as a Virtual Server)
On the Sun Ray, start our RDP client to connect to running VM, over the air

The full picture is then

Sun Ray device ---> Sun Ray Server ---> RDP Client ---> Virtual Box ---> Swift Demo

This setup works great ! People are always quite impressed when I plug my Sun Badge in a Sun Ray client and instantly receive my Windows screen running in a VM on another machine.

It is important to understand that Virtual box *is* the RDP server here, independently of any OS running as guest. This setup will also work with Linux or Solaris guest. Read this article to find more about Virtual Box’s headless capabilities.