Specifications

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VMware GSX Server Virtual Machine Guide
system natively. This is necessary because any changes to sectors on the physical disk
that have been modified on the disk invalidate the snapshot for the disk.
Configuring a Linux Host
1. If you are running a Windows guest operating system, read Setting Up Hardware
Profiles in Virtual Machines on page 206. You should boot the guest operating
system natively on the computer and create a hardware profile for the virtual
machine before proceeding.
2. Create a separate configuration for each guest operating system.
3. Check operating system partition mounts. Be sure the existing disk partitions
that you plan to configure the virtual machine to use are not mounted by Linux.
4. Set the device group membership or device ownership.
The master physical disk device or devices need to be readable and writable by
the user who runs GSX Server. On most distributions, the raw devices, such as
/dev/hda (IDE physical disk) and /dev/sda (SCSI physical disk) belong to
group ID disk. If this is the case, you can add GSX Server users to the disk
group. Another option is to change the owner of the device. Please think
carefully about security issues when exploring different options here.
Often, the most convenient approach is to grant GSX Server users access to all
/dev/hd[abcd] raw devices that contain operating systems or boot
managers and then rely on GSX Server’s physical disk configuration files to guard
access. This provides boot managers access to configuration files and other files
they may need to boot the operating systems. For example, LILO needs to read
/boot on a Linux partition to boot a non-Linux operating system that may be
on another drive. As noted above, you should consider the security implications
of the configuration you choose.
5. If you plan to run a second Linux installation from an existing partition as a guest
operating system and your physical computer’s /etc/lilo.conf has a
memory register statement such as Append= "mem…", you may want to
adjust the append memory parameter or create a new entry in LILO for running
Linux in a virtual machine.
If the amount of memory configured in lilo.conf exceeds the amount of
memory assigned to the virtual machine, the guest operating system is likely to
panic when the virtual machine tries to boot the second Linux installation.
You can create another entry in lilo.conf for running Linux in a virtual
machine by specifying a different amount of memory than what would normally
be recognized when Linux boots directly on the physical machine.