Realm Linux VMware Guest issues

From NCSUTechstaffDocs

When you install Realm Linux into a guest, you can have some "gotcha" moments.

VMware Tools

You probably want VMware tools installed in your guest. You have two choices about VMware Tools available:

• Use the open VMware tools provided by Campus Linux Services by adding the line:

  package @ realmlinux-vmware
  

  in your web kickstart config file. This is the simplest method.

• set up things so that post install you prepare for building the VMware Tools via the perl script VMware provides with the tools. This is usually how ITECS sets up Virtual machines.

For more information about how the second method works check out the example included in the article Realm Linux install with VMXNET driver support.

Time Skew

This is less of an issue with RHEL 5.4 and later. Since the current kernel is from RHEL 5.4, we don't need to set any kernel parameters for time synchronization with VMware Tools installed. We just have to enable within viclient in the "Edit Settings..." -> "Options Tab" -> "VMware Tools" dialog. Make sure "Synchronize guest time with host" is checked as shown in the image below...

You can fid the VMware Timekeeping best practices for Linux documentation here.

If you are running an older version of RHEL, such as RHEL 4.8, you need to add some parameters to the kernel in the grub.conf file. You need the paramaters clock=pmtmr and divider=10.

If you are using VMware Tools time synchronization, make sure you are not running ntpd within your Linux guest. You can disable ntpd by adding the following commands in your web kickstart config %post section:

%post

cat << EOF >> /root/fix-ntpd
#!/bin/bash
sleep 2m
/sbin/chkconfig --level 123456 ntpd off
/sbin/service ntpd stop > /dev/null 2>&1
EOF

chmod 700 /root/fix-ntpd
at -f /root/fix-ntpd now > /dev/null 2>&1

This "at" job trick is required to get around other software configuring ntpd on first boot. We let ntpd get configured and then we un-configure it 2 minutes after the job starts running. The job can't run at install time so it runs on first boot when atd starts.

Kernel/OpenAFS updates

If you used the open vmware tools you don't need to do anything special.

If you used the VMware supplied Tools rpm you may want to look at the example in the article Realm Linux install with VMXNET driver support. The example in that article shows how to alter the /etc/rc.d/rc.local script so that new VMware Tools drivers will be built after each time a new kernel boots.