I’m currently working on my final project for a degree in Computer Network Systems. As you might have guessed, the school’s computers run Windows while my home setup is all Ubuntu, all the time. My project consists of creating several virtualized instances of Windows Server 2003 and making them do the Microsoft dance with Exchange, SQL, etc. I figured I could take my 300 GB external hard drive to school, create the VM’s directly onto the external drive, and bring them home to work on from the comfort of my Ubuntu box. Both the school’s and my PC are running VMware Server 1.04 so it shouldn’t be a problem, right? It shouldn’t be, but it is.
I was able to add the VM’s to the inventory of machines on my Server Console by browsing to them in the normal way, but when I went to power them on the VMware window goes black momentarily and then closes. It popped up 3 or 4 errors, one of which mentions FILEIO. I checked the vmware.log file and it contained this line over and over again:
“FILEIO: Unknown filesystem 0×65735546 for directory /media/Backup/Win_Server_2003_Standard. Using non-linking locking.”
Although initially frustrating, I spent some quality time with Google and eventually discovered that editing the .vmx file would do the trick. I added this line:
mainMem.useNamedFile = “FALSE”
Once I saved and closed the file the VM’s started up correctly. It looks like a few adjustments might need to be made and it has yet to be seen how well they will travel back to Windows with the added line, I’ll post how it went after trying it out on Saturday.
