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Feature: BSD
Installing OpenBSD on VMware Server
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CommentsVMware Server supports FreeBSD as a guest OS and offers vmware-tools built for it. You can fool VMware Server into thinking that an OpenBSD VM is FreeBSD, and use OpenBSD's FreeBSD emulation to run vmware-tools.
Create a new VM and select Other/FreeBSD as the guest operating system. Configure the rest to your liking. Power on the VM you've just created and install OpenBSD as usual; if you've never installed OpenBSD before have a look at the Installation Guide. After the installation finishes, reboot into OpenBSD and enable FreeBSD emulation by issuing sysctl -w kern.emul.freebsd=1. Make this setting permanent by uncommenting the appropriate line in /etc/sysctl.conf.
Select Install VMware Tools... on the VM menu; this creates a virtual CD-ROM image which is accessible from the VM and includes a tarball with vmware-tools for FreeBSD. From that tarball we need to install the vmware-guestd daemon, which triggers events sent for the host computer and runs commands accordingly -- such as halt and reboot -- on the guest OS. So, run the following commands to mount that image and install the daemon and its configuration:
mount /dev/cd0c /mnt tar -zxvpf /mnt/vmware-freebsd-tools.tar.gz -C /tmp mkdir -p /emul/freebsd/sbin install -m 555 -o root -g wheel /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib/lib/sbin32/vmware-guestd /emul/freebsd/sbin cp -r /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib/etc /etc/vmware-tools rm -rf /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib umount /mnt
Start the daemon with /emul/freebsd/sbin/vmware-guestd --background /var/run/vmware-guestd.pid --halt-command "/sbin/shutdown -p -h now". To have it started on boot add the following lines to your /etc/rc.local file just before the echo '.' line:
if [ -x /emul/freebsd/sbin/vmware-guestd ]; then echo -n ' vmware-tools' /emul/freebsd/sbin/vmware-guestd --background /var/run/vmware-guestd.pid \ --halt-command "/sbin/shutdown -p -h now" fi
Now you can shut down the VM and check its status from the VMware Web-based management interface or console and have it halt and power off properly.
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I don't really use VMWare too much for Linux/Solaris/BSD these days, but I do keep a few around. I did a P2V (physical to virtual -- think of using Norton Ghost to a VM) migration of my old dual-P2 Redhat 9 box just so I could save one of my favorite workhorse environments before the hardware gave out. I keep a Redhat Enterprise and a SuSE Enterprise VM for when I can't get to our testing lab. I keep the latest OpenBSD around on a VM and sometimes copy it to another machine if I need to fire up a secure server to ssh into.
At home I use VMWare for 3 things. I test out new live cd ISOs for fun. I use one to browse the pron / test downloads so I can roll back all my browser history, bad cookies, malware, and other crap that I get even with Firefox. Finally, I have a VMWare image set up for work in case I don't bring my laptop home, it dies, I'm too lazy to get it out, etc. I can fire it up and tunnel in without opening my whole home machine up to the work network and BOFHs. Isolation is cool.
We're in the process of setting up two VMWare ESX servers in our testing lab to migrate our 30 or so Windows and Linux testing servers. We generally need to keep 3 versions of our software available for testing and on Windows that's pretty much one version per machine. Multiply that by 4 versions of Windows. On Linux it's a little better, but we generally have to support at least 4 versions of Linux on Intel, more once we really go 64-bit. Out of those 30 or so machines, we're usually only actively using maybe 7 of them in a testing cycle, so one quad Xeon running VMWare ESX handles that load nicely. Especially since the lab is almost entirely made up of what I call sh*tboxes -- hand-me-downs from developers. The average box is a P3-500 with 256 or 512 megs of RAM.
I have installed OpenBSD on VMWare, and I've never had a problem just doing
`shutdown -h now`
from within the OpenBSD instance. It's the same command I would use for a physical server, and it gave me the results I expected.
What's the advantage?
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on September 08, 2006 06:54 AMThanks!
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