Dualboot VMware

I got fed up with running out of disk space so I stuck an old EIDE disk (PATA?) in my Dell to stick my virtual machines on (using the advice from the previous post).

Having two different drive types worked out well. I want to play with Xen when I get a chance, so I thought I'd try setting up CentOS 5 for dual-booting and for running inside a VM when I'm running Windows.

After a quick read of the old docs for VMware 4.5 I found by Googling (http://www.vmware.com/support/ws45/doc/disks_dualboot_ws.html) I created a custom machine configuration that exposed the physical disk to the virtual machine.



Installed CentOS using VMware (because I couldn't get my machine to boot of the DVD-ROM for some reason) without a hitch, rebooted and hit F12 for the boot menu, selected the Master Primary IDE disk (rather than the SATA Master) and it booted right into CentOS.

There are a couple of issues to resolve - the graphics and audio drivers change depending on which environment CentOS is booted in. I need to add something to the init process to switch around the configuration files depending on the boot configuration. I suppose there could be a mechanism built into the OS...

VMWare Workstation Tweaks

I found a useful little article on VMWare disk performance

http://www.virtualization.info/2005/11/how-to-improve-disk-io-performances.html

It recommends disabling anti-virus auto-scanning of the VMDK and VMEM files - I also followed the .ISO recommendation as I attach a lot of them for installation/liveCD testing.

Wot no updates

So much for blogging - haven't updated this in weeks. I'm working on a couple of projects - replacing my phone service with Asterisk running on my Linksys router and I'm toying with integrating Bacula with the Amazon S3 service so I can stop worrying about backups.

I'm also trying out the CentOS 4.92 beta. Running the hgfs driver for shared folders with SELinux enabled caused the kernel to panic. Once I disable it, it worked fine. 'dmesg' had an error in it about hgfs not supporting labelling so I thought I'd get rid of it.