vmxor

vmxor creates "pristine" virtual machines on Mac OS X with VMWare Fusion.

Features:

• no dependencies other than VMWare Fusion and Mac OS X
• VM creation is determined solely from text files and official Linux distro DVD .iso files
• vmxor-make and vmxor-dhcp are just simple Perl scripts, roughly 100 lines each
• only a trivial amount of manual interaction required

As of this writing I am using vmxor with VMWare Fusion Professional 7.1 on Mac OS X 10.10 to create CentOS 7 virtual machines. In the past I've used vmxor to create Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise virtual machines.

The example below is roughly what I do to create CentOS 7 VMs, using only these inputs:

• official CentOS-7-x86_64-DVD-1511.iso file
• ks.cfg text file (45-ish lines)
• default.vmx.template text file (60-ish lines)

Example Usage

Run these commands once to setup your Mac for this example

export PATH=$PATH:/Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/
ln -s /where/you/put/DVD/iso/files/ ~/.vmxor-dvds
cd ~/.vmxor-dvds
curl -C - -L -O http://centos.mirror.constant.com/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7-x86_64-DVD-1511.iso
cd location/of/this/source/code/
./vmxor-dhcp myvm 10-99
sudo stage/commit.sh

To create a VM named myvm10 just do

cd location/of/this/source/code/examples/
./vmxor-make-centos myvm10

You will be instructed to enter linux ks=hd:fd0 to start automated CentOS 7 installation.

That's it! You will have a minimal CentOS 7 virtual server created and running. From Terminal do ssh root@myvm10 and use password changeme.

History

I wrote vmxor before Vagrant worked with VMWare Fusion. If you want to work on anything other than VMWare on Mac OS X then you should consider Vagrant or other alternatives. I have not used Vagrant but I'm sure it has way more features. On the other hand, it will probably be easier to understand and customize vmxor.

A private earlier version of vmxor ran on Fusion 3 on Mac OS X 10.6 and probably still works with this earlier version with possibly only one minor tweak.

Advanced Usage

Fusion Shared Folders

Compare default.vmx.template to examples/sharedfolder.vmx.template to see an example of a shared folder automatically added to a virtual machine. To use this non-default ".vmx.template" file, use the --vmxin argument of vmxor-make.

When configuring a new virtual machine with a shared folder, you will want to do something like the following from script:

echo .host:/shr /home/linuxuser/shr vmhgfs defaults 0 0 >> /etc/fstab
service vmtoolsd start
mount --all -t vmhgfs

At one point I found VMWare shared folders (vmhgfs) to work more reliably and more easily than NFS. But then Linux kernel updates and vmhgfs driver issues caused upgrade head-aches. I've since switched back to using NFS and not had any problems since.

Enhancing .vmx.template files

One way to make an enhanced .vmx.template file is to find the .vmx file of an existing VM and simply diff it with default.vmx.template. You'll get an idea of what lines to add. Normally .vmx files are inside the subdirectories in ~/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized.

Enjoy,

Castedo Ellerman [email protected]