So here I am creating a template installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 server for use in VMware Infrastructure. I decided to check and see what Red Hat recommends as the default sizes for various filesystems such as /, /var, /usr, and so forth. Their documentation on this subject is amazingly brief. (At the time of this writing, the section is entirely empty.)

Thanks, guys. And don't even get me started on the whole installation number thing. I miss you, FreeBSD.

A few good Parallels commercials. Too bad for them, as I've been using VMware Fusion lately. I think it is better. I also think these may be better than the original Apple ones that they're "parodies" of.

( Four YouTube embeds... )

(Originally seen here.)

I'm posting this here to my LiveJournal because I have no better place to post technical-oriented stuff right now. I've discovered how to take a hot clone of a running virtual machine in a VMware ESX environment. I thought it only appropriate to document it somewhere so it can be repeated by anybody interested.

Two nice features provided by VMware ESX and Virtual Infrastructure 3 are the ability to take a snapshot of a running virtual machine and also the ability to clone of a stopped virtual machine. However, what if you want to make a hot clone since you can't afford the downtime of the VM you're cloning? Well, using snapshots it is possible to do just that. It isn't clean, but it works.

( Read on to see how. )
If anybody knows a better way to do this, please tell me. At some point, I'll get around to playing with the VMware API and see if I can automate this to some degree. I'm not sure if the API would let you clone a snapshot though.