During the past year we've seen more and more of the old established software vendors starting to support VMware. Either by allowing their software to run on VMware or by offering solutions directly as virtual appliances.

I recently attended a presentation by Trend Micro where they told us that they were now offering a virtual OfficeScan appliance for VMware environments and that you would by using this appliance would get very good performance. Much better than you would if you ran it physically on a traditional windows server.

I think it's amazing that such products are finally targetting virtual environments. It's something I've been waiting for for many years, and now finally, things are happening!

Today I installed this appliance to see what it's good for. It's shipped as an iso file and installation is very quick. I think the initial install took about 10 minutes if not less.



When you look a bit under the hood of this VM you can tell it's a modified 64 bit RHEL 5.2 VM. Trend Micro is apparently also catching on to the cloud terminology:

RHEL is a great OS and it is the base for many vendors (including the VMware Service Console). One should however be aware that RHEL does not support VMI (paravirt_ops) because it's using a too old kernel (and they haven't backported this functionality like SUSE did).

VMware has an old Best Practices document that recommends that a virtual appliance is shipped with easy configuration through graphical or web interfaces. This appliance is following these steps with a graphical installer and a web interface that is available after installation is done. The best practices also states:

"It is also important that your virtual appliance includes VMware Tools. VMware Tools provides optimized drivers for VMware virtual hardware and management tools that can monitor and manage the virtual appliance with VMware VirtualCenter."

VMware Tools was not installed in this VM per default, but as it was based on RHEL 5.2 it should be fairly easy to install.

I did however need to change a few things to get it to mount the cdrom:
1. I added the following line to /etc/fstab
2. I created the directory /media/cdrom

Now I could (After having chosen Install VMware Tools from the menu) mount the virtual cdrom containing the tools with the command mount /dev/cdrom

Installing VMware Tools was now a breeze. I accepted all defaults and they installed successfully.

One other thing I found was that this VM wasn't following VMware's best practices on Timekeeping. VMware's kb article recommend you to add the parameters notsc divider=10


By adding those parameters to the boot image line in /boot/grub/menu.lst it will not only give you better timekeeping, but it will also give you better performance.

By doing these very few and easy steps I suddenly have a VM that is much better performing than it was out of the box. I hope also the software vendors will realize this soon so also the average admin can get optimal performance without having to read this blog posting first.

Lars