Installing VMware Server on Fedora Core 5

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Fedora logo VMware logoA few months back, I wrote about having converted the Windows XP installation on my company-supplied notebook PC to a virtual machine and was running it quite happily on Windows Vista using VMware Player. Unfortunately, it’s been slowing down (to the point that booting the Vista host, then the XP guest and logging in was taking me 15 minutes every day), so this week I rebuilt the host system. It’s still not the Vista/Linux dual boot setup that I originally intended, but I’m running a bit short on hard disk space and consequently I’m still using a single host operating system (this time it’s Fedora Core 5 as I couldn’t get SUSE 10 to install on my Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook S7010D) with VMware Server (I could have used the player again but the server product has now been released and it’s free too).

I don’t know what was wrong with the original setup – although it ran well at first, performance in both the host and guest operating systems became noticeably degraded at times but I was using a combination of a beta host operating system, a 5400RPM laptop hard disk and the VMware Player (which is probably not optimised for Vista either) what I can say is that running XP under VMware Server on Fedora rocks, even though Fedora is not a supported host operating system for VMware Server.

Incidentally, virtual machine (VM) performance can be improved by moving the VM to a separate disk and a colleague, Garry Martin, also suggested that improvements can be made by binding the VMnet adapters to a separate network interface; however in this case I only have one permanent Ethernet connection and do not want to have to connect an external disk each time I load my Windows XP environment.

Despite following the relevant sections in the VMware Server administration guide, because I used a Linux workstation distribution (and an unsupported one too), the installation of VMware Server was not entirely straightforward, but I got it working eventually and this is what I had to do:

  • Download VMware Server (v1.0.1 – build 29996 – server and client components) and register for a serial number.
  • In addition to the standard Fedora components, install the following (using the pirut Package Manager, yum or an equivalent method):
    • gcc (v4.1.1-1.fc5.i386)
    • gcc-c++ (v4.1.1-1.fc5.i386)
    • kernel-devel (v2.6.17-1.2174_FC5.i686)
    • xinetd (v2:2.3.13-6.2.1.i386)
  • Elevate permissions to root (su –).
  • Run the VMware Server installer (rpm -Uvh VMware-server-1.0.1-29996.i386.rpm).
  • Before running the vmware-config.pl script, Download the VMware any-any update (I used v1.04 – thanks to Jean-Pierre Wenzel for highlighting the existence of this unofficial patch and the need to install kernel-devel).
  • Extract vmware-any-any-update104.tar.gz and then execute ./runme.pl (this will call vmware-config.pl, allowing for the acceptance of the VMware end user license agreement, configuration of networking, specification of the server console port, definition of the location of virtual machine files and entry of the VMware serial number). If the patch is working correctly then all the prompts should work at their defaults; however it may be necessary to answer the question “What is the location of the directory of C header files that match your running kernel? [/usr/src/linux/include]” with /usr/src/kernels/2.6.17-1.2174_FC5-i686/include (or another version of the kernel-devel tools). Building the vmmon module will fail if gcc and gcc-c++ are not present and the configuration script will have to be re-run if it finds that inetd or xinetd are not installed.
  • Unzip the client installer (VMware-server-linux-client-1.0.1-29996.zip)
  • Install the VMware Server Console (rpm -Uvh VMware-server-console-1.0.1-29996.i386.rpm).
  • Run the vmware-config-server-console.pl script (not vmware-config-console.pl as stated in the documentation).
  • Drop back to a standard user account (exit) and run the vmware shell script (a wrapper for the real binaries) to start up the VMware Server Console.
  • Create and run virtual machines as normal although there were a couple more points worth noting:
    • After copying virtual machine files across from the original Windows Vista installation, I needed to make some edits to the configuration to reflect changes in file names (e.g. disk locations) to Unix formats (\ to / etc.).
    • I created a group called vmware and ran chgrp vmware filename against the VM files so that any user in the vmware group could run the VMs (not just root).

Some configuration items may have been carried out in a slightly different sequence as I tried various advice and encountered a number of issues before I got everything working but the image below shows the end result:

Windows XP in VMware Server running on Fedora Core 5

So far, the only issue I have found is with the guest operating system clock (which is not keeping time). This could be because I originally installed VMware Tools from a Windows version of the Virtual Server beta – I’ll install the correct version next week to see if it makes any difference. In any case, performance is very good – in fact, when running full screen, it would be very difficult to tell that the Windows XP guest is not running on native hardware.