Virtualization news and reviews
VMware Workstation 6.5
If you were thinking of getting yourself a VMware Workstation, here's your chance to do it 25% cheaper!
If you go to the VMware Workstation Product page and click Buy Now, proceeding to the checkout will allow you to type in a promo code. Use this one to get a 25% discount: CyberMondayDeal.
There's not much time left though, this offer expires at 11:59PM PT on Monday, December 1, 2008.
I'm going through a rather busy week, so only one thing from the news today: VMware releases Workstation 6.5!
I've been spending increasingly more time researching topics for Unix Tutorial on one of my desktops. Ubuntu has replaced the Windows Vista I had and so far I quite like the experiment. Out of the box, all of the hardware was properly supported and even the NTFS partitions left from Vista install are easily available.
One of the first things I've decided to install was the trial version of the latest VMware Workstation: 6.0.3 build-80004. And although it installed without a problem, when I tried to run one of the previously created virtual machines, I got the following error:
VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0)
Failed to allocate page for guest RAM!
As it turned out after a quick investigation, that was a result of running a VM from a NTFS partition, because its default mounting settings don't have the exec option.
Since you shouldn't be running anything critical through an NTFS driver anyway, I simply moved the VM onto one of the ext3 partitions and, sure enough, it fixed the guest RAM allocation error.
Update: if your scenario prevents you from moving a VM to a native partition, use the following option:
mainmem.UseNamedFile = "FALSE"
You should add it to the vmx file of your VM. Thanks for the tip, benito!
See Also
Many of you have probably heard about the recent Core Security findings which resulted in a security advisory CORE-2007-0930, Path Traversal vulnerability in VMware's shared folders implementation:
A vulnerability was found in VMware's shared folders mechanism that grants users of a Guest system read and write access to any portion of the Host's file system including the system folder and other security-sensitive files. Exploitation of these vulnerability allows attackers to break out of an isolated Guest system to compromise the underlying Host system that controls it.
Successful exploitation requires that the Shared Folder's feature to be enabled which is the default on VMware products that have the feature AND at least one folder of the Host system is configured for sharing.
Lately I've been doing a lot of research with virtual machines created in VMware Workstation. And one of the first things you become conscious about is that disk performance in your virtual machine is far from being ideal. Don't be too quick to blame VMware though, there's quite a few reasons related to poor I/O, and that's why I decided to give you a few tips to achieve maximum performance.