[ale] Private Tomcat 6.0 Server and VMware Server 2.0

[Michael H. Warfield]

On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 10:00 -0500, Damon L. Chesser wrote: 
> On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 09:41 -0500, gene.poole at macys.com wrote:
> > I've got this large custom box (running CentOS 5.4) that I'm running
> > several applications on (JBoss 5.0, custom Apache 2.2, Tomcat 6.0, and
> > Oracle 11g R2 database). So I decided to install VMware Server 2.0.2
> > so I could utilize all of those free cycles. 
> > 
> > After installing the VMware I noticed that I could no longer access my
> > Tomcat, and there was a new Tomcat running under the VMware file
> > system. 
> > 
> > Does anyone know how I can get my Tomcat back and still run VMware? Do
> > I need to move my Tomcat to one of my virtual servers? 
> >   
> > Thanks,
> > Gene Poole

> Uninstall vmware server and install kvm instead.  It is Linux native,
> Free, Open Source, part of the Linux kernel, well understood and
> maintained, and with libvirt virt-manager can be managed remotely with
> out interfering with your stack.  We just talked about that last night
> at ALE Central meeting.  Just my 2c.  HTH

Another question, too, that (should) always come up with virtualization
in the discussion is what are your needs?  If you're just running Linux
on Linux, do you really need full machine virtualization on that level?
If you're running Windows or *BSD or something requiring a unique
specialized kernel, sure (I've even run old legacy SCO systems in VMware
cans to get them onto something more modern).

I don't know of much you can't do containerized OS vertualization like
linux-vservers, OpenVZ, or LXC, if everything is running on a Linux
kernel.  Since the base engine, in this case, is running CentOS, OpenVZ
is almost a no brainer.  The kernel doesn't change that often and the
OpenVZ project has been tracking the RHEL kernels for ages, so it's just
an update just like a regular kernel update.  If it was a more recent
kernel than the CentOS 2.6.18 kernel (something >= 2.6.29) then I would
be saying go with LXC (although OpenVZ as announced development efforts
to support 2.6.32 with a target of about a month from now).

In addition to having a fraction of the performance overhead of full
machine virtualization, containerize virtualization has a much smaller
footprint in memory and on disk.  You don't need dedicated disk images
for file systems.

As was pointed out in the talk last night, XEN, VirtualBox, and KVM (and
QEMU) can be managed by libvirt and virsh.  So can OpenVZ and LXC.

Surprise surprise!  Looking at the libvirt site, they are now also
claiming to support VMware ESX and GSX servers.  That's news to me.
That must have changed fairly recently:

http://libvirt.org/drvesx.html
== 
Deployment pre-requisites 

None. Any out-of-the-box installation of ESX/GSX should work. No
preparations are required on the server side, no libvirtd must be
installed on the ESX server. The driver uses version 2.5 of the remote,
SOAP based VMware Virtual Infrastructure API (VI API) to communicate
with the ESX server, like the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client (VI
client) does. Since version 4.0 this API is called VMware vSphere API. 
== 

Evaluate your needs first and then choose the appropriate
virtualization.  Why use a hammer when a screw driver will do?

Given my diverse environment and needs, I'm running most of these almost
side by side.

Regards,
Mike
-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
   /\/\|=mhw=|\/\/          | (678) 463-0932 |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
   NIC whois: MHW9          | An optimist believes we live in the best of all
 PGP Key: 0x674627FF        | possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!
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