Roy's musings

VMWare player doesn't support SMP, though you might see a processor which is capable of SMP. Here is a quote from the VMWarePlayer manual : Virtual SMP VMware Player does not support Virtual SMP™. You cannot use VMware virtual machine that has more than one virtual processor assigned. For e.g. when I look at /proc/cpuinfo, I am seeing only one processor though my VMWare Player emulates "Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7300 @ 2.00GHz". When I inspect the boot messages, I realized that my Linux switch to uniprocessor configuration while booting: [ 7.135461] SMP alternatives: switching to UP code [ 7.135523] Freeing SMP alternatives: 11k freed So if you are trying to test any multithreaded appplication, beware that the results you will get in your VMWare Player's Linux and the real Linux will not be the same. Your VMWare Player's version is likely to give you worse results as its running in uniprocessor mode.

A couple of weeks old news, but still thought worth sharing. For all those VMWare fans, the VMWare Server is now available free of cost for download. Earlier only VMWare player was available for download. Download and try it from here . You might wish to view all my previous posts on VMWare to know few more tricks.

We had a heated discussion in our team today. One of my teammates was complaining that the existing 8 GB disk (the .vmdk file) that he had attached to his VMWare Player was running out of space. Hence he needed a work around for that. Remember that all of us only have a VMWare Player, not a VMWare Workstation using which you can create a hard disk image. I suggested him a hack. Copy the existing .vmdk file. Give it a new name. Add that file as the next SCSI drive in your VWWare configuration file (.vmx file). You can do it easily by editing your .vmx file in notepad. Start your virtual OS. In his case it was RH Linux. Format the newly added disk. (mke2fs /dev/sdb). You are done. You have another 8 GB of storage. But still I was not happy about this hack. What in case he exhausts all this 8 GB soon. So I was searching the Internet. My objective is simple: I have an up and running VMWare virtual OS where I would like to add a new SCSI drive of whatever size I want. Well! Forever For Now ...