HOWTOlabs VMware
Setting up VMware Workstation and Linux sessions

Elsewhere

VMware Workstation: Not free, great for doing testing and basic production needs.  It allows elaborate snapshot and rollback of session state.  I prefer to run VMware Workstation under Windows XP Professional because Remote Desktop works well with Win/OS X/Linux remote clients.

VMware Server: free product that provides much of the functionality of VMware Workstation.  Unlike VMware Workstation, it runs headless (no GUI interface). Instead it has a funky web portal interface that allows managing VM sessions.  What is Quirky is that the 'console' (i.e. desktop, ...) display for a given VM requires an exotic plug-in that seems to only work with MS Windows / IE web browser.  Ironic that if you ran VMware Server on Linux, you may find you have to use Windows / IE as only way to access a VM's console.  [User Guide]

VMware ESXi / Infrastructure: stay tuned

Linux VMware session - adding vmtools

If you have a CD-rom mounted, unmount it.  From VM Workstation menu, use install VMware tools, from VMware Server there is a similar button that does the same thing.  All this does it is 'enable' virtual CD which contains VM tools installer/source.

# mount /dev/cdrom /media

  ... or similar mount command ...

Usually there is are .gz and a .rpm installer files.  Do this from DIRECT console, not from a remote login!  Note, after install vmware-config-tools.pl needs to be run (requires perl, install it first if needed).

# rpm -qi VMwareTools

# vmware-config-tools.pl

Often vmware-config-tools.pl will not complete successfully, then ask if you want to build correct version of tools from source. This means you need to have compiler and kernel headers installed. Sometimes current running kernel headers are not available, instead a newer kernel and headers is available - so upgrade both kernel and headers to new version. 

# yum install gcc

# yum install kernel-devel

It may ask you to restart networking with some additional kernel module directives.  You will probably have to restart.  After VM session is restarted, the Install VMware Tools menu will still be enabled.  Remember, for Linux anyway, that only allows mounting the virtual installer CD.  So even after you have the tools installed and running VM Workstation will continue to present that menu.  Better I think would be for it to say 'enable Tools install disk'.

# vmware-config-tools.pl

# service vmware-tools status

RHEL/CentOS 5.4 / VMware Server 2.X - Web Console Crashes

Elsewhere

Apparently, VMware Server works well with RHEL/CentOS 5.3 and earlier versions of Red Hat and CentOS operating systems.  However something in RHEL 5.4/CentOS 5.4 causes the underlying Tomcat service which powers the Web Console to crash - VMsessions continue to run afterwards.  This issues seems to be outstanding at least through VMware Server 2.0.2.  Until VMware provides an updated version that resolves this, best practice then is to limited operating system to RHEL/CentOS 5.3 and block updates to glibc. 

# diff -r1.1 /etc/yum.conf

  19a20,23
  > # Until VMware fixes RHEL/CentOS 5.4 Tomcat issues - Rick
  > exclude=glibc* nscd gcc gcc-c++ cpp libstdc++* nss_ldap

Time sync

Elsewhere
On the system running VM Workstation, find the folder that your VM session files are contained in. Under Windows it might be something like C:\vmsessions\testmv\RHAT4.vmx
There should already be a directive like
tools.timeSync = "FALSE"
Stop the VM Session, close the session.

Change the directive to TRUE.  Load and start the VM Session.

It may ask you to restart networking with some additional kernel module directives.

Time sync, Linux 2.6 kernels

Before Linux 2.6 kernel, 100 interrupts/second was typical.  With newer kernels, 1000 interrupts/second is typical.  However, this higher interrtupt frequency presents and undue burden for the virtualized system.  Typical symtoms are the virtualized session clock lags far behind real time.  Recently some kernel parameters have been integrated in to 2.6 and later kernels to reduce interrupts/second.  This allows newer kernels to be virtualized without subjecting hosting operating system to unnecessarily frequent interrupts.  For for RedHat and CentOS 5.2, use divider=10 as kernel parameter (see elsewhere for links with specific details).  Note: Simplying doing a shutdown -r now 'restart' may cause subsequent time to be wonky.  Better to do a shutdown -h now, then wait for the operating system to truly be shutdown, then manually start the VM session - somehow this helps the clock run better.