MacLochlainns Weblog

Now that I’ve organized the blog a bit, I can start posting new information. VMWare Fusion is a great tool but I fat fingered a few installs before i mastered it. You need a customized set of settings to create an effective virtual machine to run Oracle 11g. You need to allocate enough memory and pre-allocate disk space before you do the install or it takes much longer. You may also fragment a base operating system unless you setup a separate mount point (true also for VMWare Workstation for Linux).

You’ll find the steps to create a customized virtual machine for a Red Hat AS 4 installation in the Configure Custom VM blog page. It’s more or less the same thing for Oracle 10g or the Oracle eBusiness suite, except you’ll need to pre-allocate more disk space.

I was doing yet another install of Red Hat AS 4 in VMWare Fusion and ran into a new error. It’s the following: The virtual machine is unable to reserve memory.

The only way I found to fix this involves opening a terminal and killing the process manually. Killing without prejudice (cleanly shutdown the process and dependents) didn’t work. I had to kill it with prejudice (shutdown the process notwithstanding anything), then click the Abort button. The next error message says the peer process is missing and allows you to exit VMWare Fusion. Then, you reboot the Mac OS X.

The steps for find the process and killing it are:

1. Open a Terminal and run the following command:

# ps -ef | grep vmware

It returns something like this:

    0    90     1   0   0:00.00 ??         0:00.00 /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet-dhcpd -cf /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/dhcpd.conf -lf /var/db/vmware/vmnet-dhcpd-vmnet8.leases -pf /var/run/vmnet-dhcpd-vmnet8.pid vmnet8
    0    98     1   0   0:00.00 ??         0:00.00 /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet-dhcpd -cf /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet1/dhcpd.conf -lf /var/db/vmware/vmnet-dhcpd-vmnet1.leases -pf /var/run/vmnet-dhcpd-vmnet1.pid vmnet1
  501   160   115   0   1:44.12 ??         3:15.87 /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/MacOS/vmware -psn_0_77843
    0   322     1   0   0:00.07 ??         0:00.29 /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-vmx -E en -D ZjTtGrJgANADRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA= -# product=1;name=VMware Fusion;version=2.0;buildnumber=116369;licensename=VMware Fusion for Mac OS;licenseversion=6.0 build-116369; -@ pipe=/var/folders/fi/fiepDOKbFJeE42RxGcDBgU+++TI/-Tmp-//vmware-mclaughlinm/vmxd9641b5487a98f78;readyEvent=24 /Volumes/Disk2/Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Oracle.vmwarevm/Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Oracle.vmx
  501   397   303   0   0:00.00 ttys000    0:00.00 grep vmware

2. Kill the VMWare Fusion process by using the following syntax:

# kill -9 322

3. Reboot the operating system.

I’d already upgraded my Windows x86 instances to 2.x on my Mac Book Pro but hadn’t got around to Ubuntu until today. The upgrade went fine, and VMWare Tools compilation succeeded and kernel reports were normal. Unfortunately, CUPS (Common Unix Printing Service) fails to start correctly and there doesn’t appear to be any way to fix it without changing the VMWare Fusion libraries. It appears to be a bug introduced by VMWare Tools. I’ve updated my Ubuntu VMWare printer set up steps to note it. If you’ve got a fix for the problem, let me know.

Over the last month I’ve built a number of test environments. Specifically, working with 64 bit OS. I’ve found a number of quirks.

Pet peeves include: (1) The Microsoft patching progrm auto detects x64 and chooses to install IE x64 when Flash is 32 bit and inoperable with 64 bit browsers; (2) VMWare Workstation disallows installation of 64 bit OS when running on Vista Home x64 (appears to require Vista Business or Ultimate); and (3) the work arounds required to install Oracle XE on Ubuntu x64.

A bright note is how slick VMWare Fusion manages installation on a Mac over VMWare Workstation on Windows or Linux. Perhaps those features will be in the next release.