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Yesterday i came back from San Diego (MMS 2007) and was due to a jetlag unable to sleep, so i had to spend my time wiseley
So i decided to try the new Virtual Server R2 SP1 beta 2 and installed CentOS 4.4 in it as a guest system. I allways use CentOS cause it’s a free RedHad Enterprise alternative based on RedHad’s Distro, so i can use RPM and Yum for installation and updates.

This was my download list :

CentOS Server CD
Virtual Server R2 SP1 beta 2
Microsoft Virtual Machine Additions for Linux (You need to register on connect for this download)

Let’s have a beer and fire the Virtual Server installation up.

After installing Virtual Server on my machine i created a Virtual Machine with all the default options and mounted my CentOS ISO image in it. After starting the Virtual machine i selected the text setup, so the Virtual Machine was not so stressed during the installation.

I installed only the development and editor packages in CentOS + SSH and no other services, to ensure that my system is as clean as possible.

All the other settings are default.

After the installation of CentOS I took a beer and logged on to my machine and tried to install the VM additions.

First I’ve mounted the VM Additions CD into my Virtual Server using the webinterface.
In Linux i also have to mount the CD before I could use it, to mount the CD in Linux I used the following command:

mount -t iso9660 -o ro /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom

Now I switched to the CD-rom using cd /media/cdrom
I try to install the VM Additions by typing rpm -ivh vmadd-full-0.0.1-1.i386.rpm --force but unfortunatly the logfile tells me that installation was unsuccesfull cause the Kernel Module was not found and a compiler was not installed.

Damn, time for an other beer and think things over, what could i have missed. I’m just a Linux novice but played a bit with an other server also and remeberd that if i had to make a package i allways had to something with GCC, so lets try to install that first.

yum -y install gcc

The cool thing about yum is that it checks for dependencies and also downloads them to. After installing GCC i tried installing the VM additions again, but stil the logs telling me that the Kernel Modules could not be found. Man, if this keeps going i would be out of beer in no time (no i’m not a problem drinker,’i drink to solve my problems )

Lets search the net to find a solution and after a few minutes i found how to install the Kernel Modules for my system.

By running the following command i got my Kernel Version :
uname -r
The result was : 2.6.9-42.0.10.EL

Ok now i could install the Kernel Modules :
yum install kernel-devel-2.6.9-42.EL (note how the kernel version is used in this command)

I rebooted my server and damn it is installed but still not working :

Time for more beer and think things over. Lets try to install the VM Additions again, now all modules are installed maybe it will work better. First i had to mount the CD again (it keeps losing the mount after a reboot) and installed the VM Additions again. I did’nt want to reboot again so i tried to start the VM additions manualy:
service vmadd start now i got a green Ok telling me the additions are working.

Ok lets take a beer to celebrate and wath the machine coming up again:

Because i dont use SCSI on my virtual machine a removed the symbolic link to S30vmadd-scsi from the folders : /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/ and /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/ so my machine don’t load the VM Addtions for the SCSI interface.

Now in my Virtual Server Web interface it sees my VM Addtions for Linux :

but a little bug (i think it is) is the Virtual Server Logfile, it tells me that the beta VM Additions are outdated, but i dont give a f***

This post was powerd by Grolsch.

Have fun out there,

Erik Luppes

This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Linux, Virtualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.