I hosed myself with VMware...

[yabits]

It has been an interesting day, and I've learned a lot.

I started out by installing VMware workstation 6.5 on my SLES 10 sp2 machine, then proceeded to create a guest OS of Windows 2003 Server, accepting the 8 GB disk recommendation. After installing all the patches and updates, I took a snapshot of the system, and then proceeded to install Visual Studio. The install stopped with the system telling me I ran out of virtual disk space.

I then tried to shut the 2003 server down and the thing hung. No vmware commands seem to relieve the hangup so I killed the vmware process altogether. Now when I boot up the Suse box, I get a message telling me that the X Server is kaput and so I get no graphics display.

I am a Linux novice, but a pretty quick learner. I thought I would try out this forum as a way to swap notes and learn even more very quickly (hopefully).

Thank you in advance for any guidance you can give me.

[yabits]

Update: Going ahead with a clean installation of the OS.

[D-cat]

Ummm, okay. Good luck.

Do you know how much free space you had on the host hard drive? Running out of HDD space can grind many things to a halt on any graphical OS. I don't know of any other way VMWare could be responsible for you system no longer booting up X.

Now if your hard drive was going kaput, that might be another story that would kill processes in Linux and the VM likewise...

As I have said, good luck. I'm curious now how this turns out.

[gogalthorp]

Might be too late but I created a separate partition to hold my VM's. By default VMware will put the VM's on the root partition. Generally root is not all that big if you use the defualt install. I created a 4th partition (normally Suse uses 3) of 30gig and mount it as vm. Then when I install VMware I tell it to use /vm for the VM's. This way I can reinstall the OS without effecting my VM data.

[yabits]

Thank you, D-Cat.

To answer your question, the 160 GB disk only had Suse Linux and VMware on it, but I didn't allocate enough space for the guest OS.

A search of the web -- while my system was in a VMware-hung condition for an hour -- provided some indication that killing the vmware process was a very risky move. But nothing else that was recommended to get it to end gracefully had any impact. I also came across problems being encountered with X-windows/graphics as a result of some abnormal operation with VMware. (There is a thread in this forum where one contributer mentioned this.)

It's my intent to use my current state of ignorance to help others, so I'll be tracking my progress as I get to a condition that more closely resembles a best practices approach to what I'm trying to do with this server. Stay tuned; this might be fun.

[yabits]

Thank you, gogolthorp.

I'll investigate your suggestion. I completely re-installed the Suse OS last night and I am now getting to the point where I am working with vsftpd. My server performs a dual function as an FTP upload server as well as a development platform for Windows applications.

I will start a new thread to track my progress and steps with setting up a secure drop for FTP using vsftp.

I am encountering some problems with doing an update to vsftpd, so please consider looking at that thread.

[yabits]

Examining my system, I've got two 149 GB drives and no hardware RAID. I have decided to create three partitions: 2GB for swap, 50 GB for Linux, and the rest of one drive, nearly 96 GB as /vm. Then, I set up RAID 1 to have the VM volume mirrored on the second drive.

[D-cat]

You might want to consider 20GB for / (linux root) and 30 GB for /home. That way, if your system bombs again or just for when you upgrade in the future, you will not hose your personal settings and files.

Just a suggestion. Your proposed layout should work fine.