Configuring Ubuntu as a VMware Host

I love VMware. And Ubuntu has finally made it feasible to have a stable, mostly secure implementation of VMware available for everybody. Sure VMware server runs on Windows. But you don’t get months of uptime with windows. Anybody who tells you otherwise is not applying security updates. Linux is a much better server host, and in this post I will explain how to get VMware server installed and running on Ubuntu Feisty.

First you need to install Ubuntu. I download the Ubuntu Server ISO, as I prefer to set this up using a bare bones system. I will eventually want to install Xubuntu though, and using the server kernel probably doesn’t matter much to most people.. so you can use whichever version of Ubuntu you’d like. These instructions will go through using Ubuntu Server.

Installing Ubuntu itself is explained a million times on the net, and is really not in the scope of this post. I did not set up Ubuntu to be a DNS or Lamp server (the only real option Ubuntu Server gives you), ending me up with a bare system and a command prompt.

So the first thing to do here is check for updates.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

This first downloads all the available updates from the Ubuntu repositories, then applies them. It typically will not actually upgrade the kernel though, so let’s do that next.

sudo apt-get install linux-server

Once this completes, reboot the system.

sudo shutdown -r now

Once you are back up, let’s install the linux headers and the build essential files.

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-server
sudo apt-get install build-essential

Now we’ve got a nice, updated system. Let’s get a graphical interface.

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

This step takes a while, but is pretty painless. There is one thing to configure here, and that is the available screen resolutions. As I can rarely remember what the monitors I have support, I err on the high side here, by selecting all the resolutions including 1280 down to the lowest. Once this is complete, reboot again to get you into your graphical interface.

sudo shutdown -r now

On boot up, you now will login to XFCE, a more lightweight user interface. It should be familiar to anybody who is used to Gnome, but even if you’re not, it’s pretty simple to explore. I always make these changes:

Right click the taskbar at the top and “Add New Item”, adding:
Verve Command Line
System Load Monitor
a Launcher for xfce4-terminal, which is the terminal application

This is very much optional, but it certainly makes things easier to navigate.

Next let’s adjust the repositories, so that we can tell Ubuntu to include commercial software (such as VMware server). Click on Applications -> System - Synaptic Package Manager. Select Settings -> Repositories.

In the first tab, under “Installable from CD-ROM/DVD” I always uncheck both options here. I tend to not have the Ubuntu CD in a convenient place, and unchecking this means that when you install software that originally is on the cd, it will just download it from the net rather than forcing you to find and insert the disk. This is optional.

In the Third-Party Software tab, click Add.. and in the APT Line field type in:

deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu feisty-commercial main

Click close. Synaptic will then likely warn you that the Repositories ahve changed, just hit close there too. We can just quit out of Synaptic then.

We now need to fire up that terminal program (if you didn’t add a launcher to the taskbar, you can find the terminal in Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal. We need to update our apt to include the new repositories.

sudo apt-get update

Now we can install vmware-server.

sudo apt-get install vmware-server

This is a fairly large file too, but once it is downloaded you will be prompted to accept a license agreement, then eventually asked for a serial number. You will need to obtain this number from VMware, but it’s free and pretty easy. To have a serial emailed to you, just fill out the form here:

http://register.vmware.com/content/registration.html

Note: be sure to select the proper host Operating Sytem (Linux) on that form, because it seems the serial numbers for VMware Server on Linux and Windows hosts are not interchangeable. I registered for a pile of keys a while ago, and just refer to the email whenever I need to do this installation.

So ok, now you’ve got VMware server installed! You can get into it by clicking Accessories -> System -> VMware Server Console. Hit Connect with Local Host selected, and you’re into the interface! You can now create a new VM, or open an existing one, or whatever you please. Windows XP? Ubuntu? Red Hat? SuSE? Haiku? NetBSD? Hey whatever Operating System you want to play with, you are now able to do it.

There are just a couple notes. I usually will add firewall rules to the host, to shore up the security a bit. I’ll talk about this in a future post, but firewall builder is my current favorite, which simply is an interface to write up iptables rules.

On a server I also turn off the screensaver. This is done by going to Applications -> Settings -> Screensaver Settings and changing the Mode to “Disable Screen Saver”.

Also, in order to have your VM start up automatically when the host comes on, you will have to select this option in the settings for the particular VM (click the VM menu in VMware Server while you have a VM selected).