Maybe I'm doing something wrong...

[wolfwings]

...but every, single, god-damn time I try to install Ubuntu under VMWare Server... everything from square one of the installer to the final VM, no matter what I do, runs like ass.

I mean it, it feels like I'm trying to play Quake 3 over a satellite link, navigating the menu's on the Ubuntu install CD, Server or Desktop. Text-mode or not.

And even SSHing into the minimal box, typing has random pauses, pressing tab for auto-complete just flat hangs for ten or more seconds... it just makes no sense. Processes just hang and freeze with no warning, just sitting there spinning their wheels, then the VM decides to do more again...

This is regardless of if VMWare tools, Open-VM-Tools, or no VM tools are installed. Regardless of if it's 32-bit or 64-bit, LSILogic, BusLogic, or IDE hard drives, or anything else. What is Ubuntu doing to the kernel and everything else to make it run this poorly?

And CentOS I've just never been patient enough to sit through their freakin' DVD or full set of CD images just to get the VM installed... seriously, their packaging system is borked when it can't even understand the concept of 'just give me a minimal install CD' as a core concept. Hello? This isn't the Slackware days when we need to sneakernet everything to a friend's house... why do we need to download a couple of gigabytes just to install your OS? What is this, MicroSoft?

Then I compare everything to Gentoo's kernels, where things just scream along, my clock doesn't fall out of sync, the installer is under half a gig for the main install, and there's no cruft from the get-go... it just... baffles me. There's basically no chance Gentoo can ever get into Corp datacenter environments, but gah...

And yes, this is a kinda random rant. Still... gah!

Comments

[ssurgul.livejournal.com]

Well, according to one of my tech journal thingies, Torvalds himself is very annoyed with the latest releases of the Linux kernels as being bloated. I haven't tried to run Ubuntu in a VMWare shell lately, but when I was running it before,I didn't notice these problems. I have installed Karmic on a separate partition and other than the usual frustration with dual monitors, I hadn't noticed any issues.....

I'd give it a month or two and someone on the VMware forums will undoubtedly come up with some stunningly simple solution that will make no sense at all why it would work, but it works flawlessly.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

The thing is... this is true from Ubuntu 8.04 (LTS or not) Desktop, Server, JeOS, what-ever version all the way up to 9.10 that I've seen. VM Server 1.0.10 on my T61p laptop under Windows XP x64 w/ 8GB RAM, or under ESX 3.5 at work, same thing. Shove it through NAT, bridged networking, purely virtual networking, same results. I've poured days into alternate installations to try to resolve this.

Ubuntu's installer is like pushing keys through molasses over a flaky connection, and the resulting VM is persnickety as well though NOT as out-right input-laggy most of the time, just unexplained pauses and time-sync issues. It's why we've moved away from Ubuntu on our ESX-hosted VM's at work, due to this issue being unresolvable to date.

So yeah... I've given it two YEARS at this point, Ubuntu just doesn't play well under VMWare as far as I can see. Certainly nowhere near as well as, for example, Gentoo does.

[ssurgul.livejournal.com]

Well, as always, I never consider a comparison between a pre-built/packaged system to be fair against Gentoo. Since you compile and build everything for the hardware present (even a virtualized hardware layer with virtualization), of course Gentoo will run best of all with any system it is installed with.

But with Ubuntu not running properly with the system you describe, the only thing I could conceive of, honestly, is the XP64 install being the main problem. I had MASSIVE problems running normal Windows apps and other things when I was running XP64 for a time. Nothing ever seemed to want to work correctly at all, from drivers to installs to disk access, and so forth. Moving to Vista64 helped some, and now that I'm using a licensed copy of Win7 64bit, it has improved dramatically.

That's about all I can think of personally, though, since even when I was running virtualization Ubuntu on my Windows box (and even, for humor value, under a full Ubuntu install), I didn't have any of the problems you're reporting.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

The part that's confusing to me though, is why does even just using the keyboard to go up/down in the Ubuntu installer have serious, visible lag on my box?

But the Gentoo minimal install-CD has no such lag at all, even if it's running the same kernel as the Ubuntu install CD?

That, to me, points that the Ubuntu CD has some odd modification to the kernel it packages that's causing this. And the fact we see the same thing at work on Dell PowerEdge servers running ESX keeps me wondering what the heck is up.

[ssurgul.livejournal.com]

That is curious.

Have you tried other virtualization software by chance? Like, VirtualBox which is also free?

I've no experience with VMServer so I can't address it directly. I was going to suggest turning on the VM extensions for the processor you have, if they are there, as well. But I don't even know if the VMServer offers such things.

Oh... and it still does this under Windows XP 32-bit.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Same laptop, rebooted into XP 32-bit, same issue on VMWare Server 1.0.10, 32-bit or 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10, installer just doesn't behave well.

I will admit I have one oddity: I have to disable multi-core rendering in Half Life 2-based games or my machine stutters horribly, so it might be correlated to that, but that's all I can personally think of.

[lionman.livejournal.com]

I happened to be talking with a client who runs VMware at home, and he commented that he's had some issues with different *nix installs under that. I didn't get into it too much with him, but he even has had some issues with apps under Vista on the VMbox.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Glad to know I'm not the only one wondering, "WTF, VMWare?" out here. =-.-=

[inaki.livejournal.com]

I had decent response from running Vmware server on windows, or ESX, but vmware server on linux was always insanely slow.. I finally ended up switching to KVM/QEMU for virtualization at home. I've had few issues since. =D

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Linux-host nothing comes close to KVM for convenience and clean function. And if I could play my games under KVM on Steam in a Windows install, I'd still have a Linux-only laptop. =^.^=

VMWare stuff

[texxgadget]

All the recent releases are full of bloatware.
Recent Ubuntu is really bad.
Remember VMWare is an earlt Redhat release as the master OS.

Re: VMWare stuff

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but that doesn't explain the Ubuntu text-mode (not graphical) installer freezing all the time for random time-periods to the point I can't navigate menus.

This is stuff DOS handled fine on my 486/33, yet Ubuntu's installer (which looks like it's still Dialog-based) barfs on my dual-core 2.5Ghz box? That's a LOTTA bloat to explain.