Soooo… the new server is in and installed. The OS (Ubuntu 9.04-server) is on a USB key and VMWare Server 2 is installed also.
Great! After getting the relevant ports opened up, I hit the first snag. I can’t seem to browse to the web interface, slight issue.
After much playing around and chcking of logs, I simply reboot and F5 and lo and behold it starts working… better but not promising. Still it’s been working since, so I won’t tempt fate and leave it at that.
Next, time to create a virtual machine. I already have my 4x 500GB drives mounted and ready via zfs-fuse, so we use that as out ‘datastore’ and create our new machine… Creation is easy, getting it to turn on appears to be less so. A wonderful error that means very little “Failed to initialize monitor device”… ok. Google points to issues with the vmmon module.. but all ariticles I find relate to failure of the vmmon module to be built correctly…. which it wasn’t. The module is there and is up and running nicely. Still I faithfully re-ran the vmware config command again and again, rebuilding the modules again and, indeed, again. No luck.
This morning a colleague advises that having virtualisation enabled in the bios could cause this issue… interesting. I had indeed enabled that thinking it might ‘help’! Ok disable and reboot, all appears well and whoopla(!) the box powers up!
Excellent, now installation. What follows is the longest MINIMAL debian install I have ever witnessed. At least an hour and change. Now the question: Is this an issue with the OS running on a USB key, or performance related to running a VM from a zfs-fuse filesystem? Unknown at this time.
I finished the install and have added some applications and I’ll keep an eye on it. If I continue to see strange things I may well switch from zfs-fuse to md/lvm to manage my disks. Although this means significantly more complicated / time consuming configurations.