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Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Deploy VMware OVA to Remote ESX

Often my customer site provides us with VMs that contain the framework which replicates their environment.  The big issue we have is that with only 8GB of RAM on the older corporate issued development laptops floating around, a VM that needs 6GB to run doesnt leave much space for jboss, eclipse and gwt developer. (And the usual Pandora, Outlook and Instant message client).

A work around I discovered is to deploy these virtual machines to a dedicated server running VMware ESX.

Traditionally I would upload an ISO to the datastore, create a VM configuration.  Mount the ISO, install the OS and configure the network settings manually.

If you already have a VM configured to use DHCP, then its a breeze with the ovftool offered by VMware.

The command is as follows:

ovftool -ds=datastore1 -nw="VM Network" -st=OVA C:\Users\Charles\Downloads\GM_Dev_Local-OWF6.ova vi://root:[password]@[host]



After 100%




That's it!

JBoss (Too Many Files Open)

I was redeploying JBoss on to a new server today.  It was already configured so i didn't think i would have any issues when starting.  However i quickly saw many java.io.Exceptions in the server log.

After a quick bit of research I discovered that the user I created to run JBoss, (webadmin) needed an increase in the maximum number of files that it could have open in the system at one time.

If using Cent OS 6.2  do so by editing the limits.conf file in the /etc/security folder. ( you will need to be root ).

Below is a screenshot of where i increased the limit to 200000 for webadmin.


After logging out and logging back in as webadmin.  the command # ulimit -Hn reported 200000 as the new limit on file descriptors.

After this i started JBoss and it worked like a charm.