open vm tools fails to customize guest - virtual-machine

I am trying to deploy a cent-os 7 VM on a vcenetr from pyvmomi python library and then before powering on the VM I am trying to setup static IP and DNS for the VM.
VM creation goes fine , but guest customization fails, givimg following error:
**Customization of the guest operating system 'rhel6_64Guest' is not sup
ported in this configuration. Microsoft Vista (TM) and Linux guests with Logical
Volume Manager are supported only for recent ESX host and VMware Tools versions
. Refer to vCenter documentation for supported configurations."
faultCause =
faultMessage = (vmodl.LocalizableMessage) []
uncustomizableGuestOS = 'rhel6_64Guest'
Now this customization problem goes away if the VM is just rebooted once. After that we can do the guest customization.
But this reboot takes around 30 seconds of time and for our case , we need to get VMs up and running faster than this time.
Any body who faces similar problem and has some context on it will be very helpful.
Also I don't understand how rebooting the VM solves this problem.
Please share your thoughts even if you don't have exact solutions .

On further Investigation I found that open-vm-tools does not work until the VM is powered on atleast once.
When Machine is powered on , the HOST system detects the open-vm-tools running on guest OS , and from there on open-vm-tools works.
So open-vm-tools can not be used for initial provisioning as it will just not work at the start up.
Cloud-init is the alternative solution which should be used for initial provisioning.

Related

Is it possible to run SikuliX on a host computer and have the script interact with virtual machine?

Currently running Windows 10 (native) and VMware Workstation 12 Player. I am running various LTS releases of Ubuntu in VMware.
I am wondering if there is way for me to run SikuliX on my main OS, Windows 10, and have the script interact with a virtual machine, running an Ubuntu OS, that I have open.
The quickstart documentation on the download site isn't very specific about the limitations of SikuliX on this topic. It simply says that you can't run it on a headless system (which VMware is not), and you need to have a monitor - the only problem is that I have no idea if SikuliX considers VMware to be a legitimate monitor or not.
I am aware of the fact that you can install Sikulix on the virtual machine itself, but this is not preferable as I would have to possibly reconfigure my VM settings to allocate more memory OR just deal with running the script at a slower pace.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
The answer is yes, if you run SikuliX on a native host, it is possible to interact with the the interface of the virtual machine the same as running SikuliX on the virtual machine itself.
Now that I think about it, I should have probably tested this out before posting the question, but hey, if anyone has the same question as I do, now you know.

VMware player gives Virtualization is incompatible with long mode on this platform

We've physical machine on which several virtual machines are installed using vm player. Now we are trying to install tool on one of these virtual machines, the tool require vm player, so we installed vmplayer 4.0.0 on the virtual machine. But the vmplayer gives error while installing tool like "Virtualization is incompatible with long mode on this platform. Without long mode support the virtual machine will not be able to run 64 bit code.
The visualization option on the physical machine is already enabled.
Any help on this.
I managed to get long mode working in Vmware by uninstalling Virtual PC.
No nesting or something, it simply started working.
I don't think it's possible with VMWare Player on the host since the VT is not virtualized.
According to http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2011/07/how-to-enable-support-for-nested-64bit.html?m=1
you could do it with VMWare vSphere 5

How to automatically replicate a running VM on ESXi to a computer running locally VMWare Player or VMWare Fusion?

The specific use case I'm dealing in our company is the following:
On a ESXi server, a dedicated VM is running to host a demo environment of a software solution. This demo environment is maintained updated by the development and maintenance team.
At specific points in time, people form sales need to take with them a copy of the latest demo environment (the VM) on their laptop to make customer's demos/presentations.
I wonder if there is a tool to automate this kind of operation silently.
Yes there is.
VMware themself make a product called vCenter Converter which is available here http://www.vmware.com/uk/products/converter/
When using the standalone client choose to convert..
Source : VMware Infrastructure virtual machine
Destination : VMware Workstation or Other VMWare Virtual Machine
You should then be able to open in in Player or Fusion.
*This will require the VMs to be off, if you don't want to turn them off you could clone them first (only available if you aren't using the free ESXi Hypervisor - thus the paid one)
Hope this helps :)

MAMP/LAMP native or virtual (Virtualbox/VMware)?

What is your preferred development environment ?
Native
WAMP/MAMP/LAMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) on Windows/MacOS/Linux
Working copy local, SVN/CVS on server
IDE/Editor on the same system (Eclipse, Aptana, Zend...)
Virtual/Native (Server on VM)
LAMP on VirtualBox/VMware
working copy in the VM
IDE/Editor on host, access to the VM with Samba, FTP, SFTP (eventually mapping with tools like WebDrive)
Virtual (VM)
Complete development environment running in a VM (server, tools, IDE)
Host is only used for special tools not available on the OS running in the VM
All have pros and cons.
With BitNami stacks you can run the exact same XAMP environment locally or remotely (and make sure everybody on your team is running the exact same stack). It is free and works on Windows, Linux, Mac.
I like having the SVN repository somewhere on a web server.
It's reasonably secure (using Apache WebDAV), and it gives me a good chance of recovering quickly from any disasters that may befall my main development machine. I have the luxury of control over my own web server, but there are lots of cheap hosts that will do the job at low cost.
As regards VM or no VM:
Advantages of VM - very fast recovery from screwing up your development environment
Ability to try out different versions or upgrades quickly
If you have many systems running the VM host, ability to quickly move the whole environment
Can choose any Host
Disadvantages of VM - performance impact; extra setup complexity.
On balance, I go for "no VM" if all the tools are available on my host system, but I do use VM when I need to run a different OS (the host system is a Mac Pro, so if I need Visual Studio, I do it with Parallels).

Debian wheezy Linux guest environment not available

Since yesterday I can't connect through ssh to all of my Debian wheezy instances on my google cloud. I can connect only through the web console. When the web console tries to negotiate the session, there's a message telling me to update the Linux guest environment. But for wheezy, there is no Linux guest environment package.
Do you have any idea to resolve this issue ?
Debian 7 images were deprecated a while a go and as there are no update packages for the Guest Environment, the best approach would be to migrate to Debian 8 or 9.
To access your VMs you might try one of the following options:
1) According to this public issue the old guest environment still work with deprecated keys. If you have an SSH client configured with an old private key, you might still have access to your VMs through it.
2) Accessing the VM via the serial console
3) Mounting, as secondary, the original disk or a copy of it in a VM you do have access to. The steps are very similar to the section “Inspect an instance without shutting it down” on this document". That would allow you to recover your data.