Virtualisation – Patrick's WebLog

VirtualBox 1.5.0 – seamless Windows windows

I installed the new version of innotek‘s VirtualBox yesterday. It worked perfectly, just had to bump the ebuild version from virtualbox-bin-1.4.0-r1 to virtualbox-bin-1.5.0, as well as virtualbox-modules-1.4.0 to virtualbox-modules-1.5.0 and emerge did all the other work.

The ‘biggest’ new feature is the ‘Seamless Mode’. This is a feature which works if you’re using VirtualBox to run MS Windows in a virtual machine on top of your GNU/Linux X desktop. I tested it with Windows XP home as guest. To be able to use it, make sure you install the ‘Guest Additions’ into the virtual MS Windows. You can do so by going to Menu / Devices / Install Guest Additions in the window of the running virtual machine. If you upgraded from an earlier VirtualBox version, repeat the ‘Guest Additions’ installation, so you have the newest version of all the drivers in your VM. After the mandatory reboot of MS Windows, press <Host>-L or go to Menu / Machine / Seamless Mode and see how the ‘classical’ virtual machine window disappears, and the open windows on your MS Windows desktop are being merged into your X desktop. This works best if you set MS Windows’ taskbar to disappear automatically.

Nicely done, innotek! Thanks 🙂

VMware –> VirtualBox

Because of ongoing problems with VMware Workstation 5.5.x’s kernel module that can’t be used with Linux 2.6.22, because of the fact that VMware is asking me to pay $99 to upgrade to VMware Workstation 6.0 (after I paid quite a sum for VMware Workstation 5.0 some time ago) and because of some other reasons (problems with GTK, only supporting OSS for sound output, …) that accumulated over time, I decided to give VirtualBox a try. And so far it looks really great. The fact that it has been completely open sourced, and it has been created by a company just some kilometres away from my home town are also a bonus 😉 The only thing I’m missing so far, is the “Team” stuff of VMware Workstation – which is great for building a small – completely virtual – test network, without having to fiddle with tun/tap on the host machine.

Great job, innotek! Thanks a lot!

VMware guest networking just stopped working [solved]

I just spent some time figuring out why the hell VMware guest networking (all virtual machines, Windows and Linux) just stopped working! I couldn’t remember to have anything changed except a kernel update on the host system, but the VMware kernel module compiled fine against it, and also the VMware services are running as they should.

I’m usually configuring my VMs to have access to the outside world via VMware’s NAT feature, which always worked fine for me.
While analysing the problem, I found out that the default NAT network address is 10.0.0.0 (on interface vmnet8). Now guess what happened! Some tomfool over at my ISP configured a host to have the IP address 10.0.0.1, which is handed out by the VMware DHCP service as the default gateway to all VMs. I found that out by running a traceroute on 10.0.0.1, which gave me several hops to a host, probably belonging to my ISP. The workaround is simple: just add the network address of the NAT interface (vmnet8) on the host. This can be done with vmware-config.pl on Linux hosts, and I’m sure there is also a way to do that on Windows hosts. I set it to a 192.168.x.y address, which works well now.
I really wonder how this could have happend – I always believed that the 10.x.y.z addresses aren’t being routed! Then why is this D-Link router AND the DSL router/modem combo in this flat routing requests to 10.0.0.1 to the Internet? Anyone?