[dba-Tech] VMWare VM and shared RAMDISK

Hi John

Two instances of "the same" machine can easily run. I have had three web servers running in parallel.
However, they must - of course - be configured to use different disk(file)s ...

/gustav

>>> jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com 19-03-2008 17:50 >>>
I got two instances of the same virtual machine going this morning.  A
simple copy of the directory is mostly all that has to be done.  There is
some sort of machine ID which VMWare complains is duplicated when the second
instance fires up, let VMWare correct that and then as the second instance
starts it says there are two machines with the same name on the network.
That required just setting the machine name to be different from the first
and rebooting that VM.

However the second machine will not run the software at the same time as the
first.  I set up virtual disks from the VM supervisor, one for each VM.
Each is a file on the hardware ram disk in the VMWare host machine.  I can
set them up, format them etc but when the second VM starts to run it
eventually reboots.  I am guessing that it is a conflict with the SATA
controller (when accessing the RAM disk) or some such.  It doesn't matter,
at this point I simply cannot run the second VM and have both access their
respective virtual drives on the Hardware RAM disk.  Sigh.

I guess that is why we do testing eh?

John W. Colby
Colby Consulting
www.ColbyConsulting.com