[UPDATE]: Read the updated article here

So VMware Server 2.x on Fedora 11 has been driving me nuts. I recently re-imaged my workstation and decided to ditch VMware Server and give Linux qemu-kvm a try since it is now the default hypervisor in Fedora and will be the standard hypervisor going forward in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (http://www.redhat.com/rhel).

We are an almost exclusively Windows shop so we use Windows DHCP servers and Windows Deployment Services (WDS/RIS) server to image all of our workstations and servers via PXE booting. If we were using an ISC dhcpd server things would probably have been a lot easier. Below I describe how I get things (partially) working.

I've had this a couple of times now in the last few weeks. I wanted to try out the Linux KVM virtualization hypervisor that comes with Fedora 11 since VMware Server 2 is giving my fits on F11 x86_64 so I installed qemu and all the supporting packages via yum.

I realized that I can't do some things with KVM that I can with VMware Server so I'm putting up with the signal 6 crashes every week or so and went back to VMware Server 2.0.1 for Linux. In order to get that running I had to apply some patches to get the kernel modules compiled but that's been done for a while.

There are a lot of postings out on the Net about performance tuning VMware products to run more efficiently. I'd thought I'd share some that I thought were farily useful (most related to running VMware Server on a Linux host).