CSE 265: System and Network Administration

Project #2

• The first step of the project is to install VMware server (free download) in your Windows XP partition. Read the documentation or other online sources to learn how to use VMware. You might want to try running one or more VMware appliances, just to get a feel of it.

• Once you have VMware functioning, install the latest Beta release (9) of the Fedora distribution in a new virtual machine (still hosted under XP). Fedora often runs the latest versions of included software, and is thus exciting, but often unstable. And a beta release is even more unstable. But this is a perfect example of how virtualization can be useful. Note that even though there may be pre-existing Fedora 9 Beta VMware appliances, you may not use them for this project. You need to create the installation yourself.

• Once Fedora 9 is installed and operating as a guest OS, supply it with some work that will require at least a few minutes to complete. Below you will find the source code to create an adequate amount of work however you may wish to write your own program.

  #include <stdio.h>
  
  int main()
  {
      int i,j,k;
  
      for(i=0; i<1000000; i++)
      {
        for(j=0; j<1000000; j++)
        {
         printf("%d\n", k++);
        }
     }
  }
  
  With your Guest Operating System practicing integer addition, monitor its CPU utilization from the Host OS. Compare these results to performance measurements taken from within the Guest OS. Can you achieve 100% CPU utilization?

  Next, assume the work you gave your Guest OS required an entire month to complete, rather than a few minutes. A benefit of many virtualization technologies is being able to migrate a virtualized system installation (and its running processes) to another physical machine.

• Rather than using another machine, install VMware server in your CentOS installation and migrate your Fedora virtual server to it. Are you able to migrate the guest OS, including active processes? If so, make sure you include how in your report; if not, be sure to include what you tried and why it failed.

• To complete the assignment, hand in (by email) a two to four page nicely-formatted report on your project, describing:
      1. The process of installing Fedora 9 as a virtualized operating system,
      2. Your impression of Fedora 9 (what you liked/disliked in comparison to CentOS 5.1);
      3. Your impression of performance, comparing what you found under the guest and under the host OSes;
      4. Your procedure for migrating your Guest OS from Windows XP to CentOS on your sandbox machine; and
      5. A description of mistakes made and lessons learned in the process.