NexentaCP on VMware Fusion and OSX
Thanks to a post by Graeme Mathieson in his fabulous blog Notes from a messy desk I found out that VMware has ported their virtualization product to OSX. It is called Fusion and currently they are running a open beta program. Since I use a MacBook for all my desktop work at home I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to try out the latest Nexenta. They have recently changed their direction and they released the new NexentaCP.
Lets see what kind of problems I ran into.
VMware Fusion was a quick download and an easy install as expected from an OSX application. The new NexentaCP iso is just the size of a standard CD so it didn’t either take long to download.
I setup a new virtual machine, configured it as a Solaris 10 64-bit server and told it to start installing from my iso image. To my surprise the keyboard didn’t work. Tried to start/stop the virtual machine (VM) once again but no success. A quick look in the Fusion forum gave me the following post that said the keyboard won’t work when the CheckPoint SecureClient is running. I disabled it and voila, the keyboard worked.
The VM started again and the NexentaCP installer started. The installer is dead simple and I’m not going to go into details. Anyone with some basic knowledge will be able to install it. One of the new key features of NexentaCP is that it has integrated ZFS boot but I will talk more about that in another post
When the install finished I tried to boot the VM again. The grub menu came up and I selected the first entry. The kernel loaded and I quickly got a kernel panic. Tried again and got the same result (surprise!). I then remember I saw something on the forums that Fusion sets up a SCSI drive emulation for 64-bit Solaris and if you setup a 32-bit installation it will use an IDE. I tried to change it on the fly but Fusion didn’t allow me to do that.
My only solution for me was to destroy my VM and created a new one. This time selected Solaris 10 and it configured an IDE drive for me. I ran the installer (it was just as easy the second time) and booted Nexenta. This time everything worked as expected and I came to the login prompt. I logged in and everything looked fine.
What did I learn from this.
- Disable SecureClient if you are running it
- Don’t use SCSI drive emulation
Apart from these problems everything worked flawlessly. Now I will start to play with ZFS boot.
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For them who not using macos, there are an very good light weight os simulation or virtualation that I came across, qemu. Very good to run on laptops, that may not have the best cpu or most memory.
There is of course VMware Server available for Windows and Linux for free as well.