Issue:
Xen migrates to VMware Player for the following reasons:
- its guests are with less interactive control than other virtualization like VMware or Virtualbox, e.g. mouse control, full screen auto-resize, etc. such that it’s difficult to have a near-to-physical Windows client experience.
- require modification of host OS kernel, implying difficulty in upgrading host OS version.
- para-virtualized machine is claimed to be faster than fully virtualized machine, but difficult to experience or quantify the difference.
Solution:
install and use qemu.
- upgrade Xen guest from paravirtualized machine to fully virtualized machine by create new vm as fully virtualized machine
- mount paravirtualized disk image
- mount and connect guest OS CD
- guest OS upgrade
- convert Xen guest raw file .img to VMware format, vmdk by applying qemu-img convert <xen virtual disk file> -O vmdk <vmware virtual disk file>
- install VMware Player
Tricks:
- Xen’s VM directory is on /var/lib/xen/images and to be started only by root, but VMware’s on /home/larry/vmware to be started by user, thus mind the permission setting of both the folders and file itself;
- set Network Adapter to “bridged” and choose “replicate physical network connection state” so as to get an IP similar to physical machine’s IP distributed by physical router
- vmware tools have to be installed initially
- nfs config. file maybe changed during upgrade of guest OS, for config. of nfs v4 on CentOS, consult
Reasons to VirtualBox:
don’t know why VMware ‘vmmon’ module always lost whenever reboot host OS. the only solution i know is to uninstall VMware, then re-install again in order to get back the ‘vmmon’.
Conclusion:
VMware is good for MS Windows Host OS, but weak in Linux Host. in contrary, VirtualBox is better for Linux Host at least it has a Command Line Interface: VBoxManage. Without it, how can i manage the VM remotely?
