[ale] Private Tomcat 6.0 Server and VMware Server 2.0

[Damon L. Chesser]

On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 12:43 -0500, Michael H. Warfield wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 10:00 -0500, Damon L. Chesser wrote: 
> > On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 09:41 -0500, gene.poole at macys.com wrote:
> > > I've got this large custom box (running CentOS 5.4) that I'm running
> > > several applications on (JBoss 5.0, custom Apache 2.2, Tomcat 6.0, and
> > > Oracle 11g R2 database). So I decided to install VMware Server 2.0.2
> > > so I could utilize all of those free cycles. 
> > > 
> > > After installing the VMware I noticed that I could no longer access my
> > > Tomcat, and there was a new Tomcat running under the VMware file
> > > system. 
> > > 
> > > Does anyone know how I can get my Tomcat back and still run VMware? Do
> > > I need to move my Tomcat to one of my virtual servers? 
> > >   
> > > Thanks,
> > > Gene Poole
> 
> > Uninstall vmware server and install kvm instead.  It is Linux native,
> > Free, Open Source, part of the Linux kernel, well understood and
> > maintained, and with libvirt virt-manager can be managed remotely with
> > out interfering with your stack.  We just talked about that last night
> > at ALE Central meeting.  Just my 2c.  HTH
> 
> Another question, too, that (should) always come up with virtualization
> in the discussion is what are your needs?  If you're just running Linux
> on Linux, do you really need full machine virtualization on that level?
> If you're running Windows or *BSD or something requiring a unique
> specialized kernel, sure (I've even run old legacy SCO systems in VMware
> cans to get them onto something more modern).
> 
> I don't know of much you can't do containerized OS vertualization like
> linux-vservers, OpenVZ, or LXC, if everything is running on a Linux
> kernel.  

Of course, you are right.  I keep forgetting this solution because of my
background in various OSs, heterogeneous environments.

> Since the base engine, in this case, is running CentOS, OpenVZ
> is almost a no brainer.  The kernel doesn't change that often and the
> OpenVZ project has been tracking the RHEL kernels for ages, so it's just
> an update just like a regular kernel update.  If it was a more recent
> kernel than the CentOS 2.6.18 kernel (something >= 2.6.29) then I would
> be saying go with LXC (although OpenVZ as announced development efforts
> to support 2.6.32 with a target of about a month from now).
> 
> In addition to having a fraction of the performance overhead of full
> machine virtualization, containerize virtualization has a much smaller
> footprint in memory and on disk.  You don't need dedicated disk images
> for file systems.
> 
> As was pointed out in the talk last night, XEN, VirtualBox, and KVM (and
> QEMU) can be managed by libvirt and virsh.  So can OpenVZ and LXC.
> 
> Surprise surprise!  Looking at the libvirt site, they are now also
> claiming to support VMware ESX and GSX servers.  That's news to me.
> That must have changed fairly recently:
> 
> http://libvirt.org/drvesx.html

That is assume!
 
> == 
> Deployment pre-requisites 
> 
> None. Any out-of-the-box installation of ESX/GSX should work. No
> preparations are required on the server side, no libvirtd must be
> installed on the ESX server. The driver uses version 2.5 of the remote,
> SOAP based VMware Virtual Infrastructure API (VI API) to communicate
> with the ESX server, like the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client (VI
> client) does. Since version 4.0 this API is called VMware vSphere API. 
> == 
> 
> Evaluate your needs first and then choose the appropriate
> virtualization.  Why use a hammer when a screw driver will do?
> 
> Given my diverse environment and needs, I'm running most of these almost
> side by side.
> 
> Regards,
> Mike



-- 
Damon
damon at damtek.com