RES Software have finally released RES HyperDrive and it’s available as a virtual appliance for VMware vSphere, VMware Workstation, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V. One thing that might surprise you is that the relevant hypervisor integration tools are not preinstalled. It surprised me, but then I thought about it; how will RES know what particular build of vSphere or XenServer you’ll be running?!
Installing the integration tools will allow the RES HyperDrive appliance to play nicely with the hypervisor and permit migration and dynamic memory support etc. Whilst there are numerous articles on the internet, I thought I’d put a few notes together in one place to make it easy for people to evaluate or deploy the virtual appliance into production.
VMware Workstation 8 and vSphere 5
Installing VMware Tools into both VMware Workstation and VMware vSphere is relatively straight forward.
- Mount the VMware Tools CD/DVD by choosing the “Install VMware Tools” option within VMware Workstation/vSphere client
- Logon to the HyperDrive console or access the virtual appliance via SSH
- Mount the CD image with mount /dev/cdrom /mnt
- Copy the installation files to the temp directory cp /mnt/VMwareTools-x.x.x-xxxxx.tar.gz /tmp
- Change the temp directory cd /tmp
- Extract the Tarball tar zxpf /mnt/VMwareTools-x.x.x-xxxxx.tar.gz
- Dismount the CD image with umount /dev/cdrom
- Install VMware Tools by running ./vmware-tools-distrib/vmware-install.pl
- Accept all the defaults and select a default resolution for X support (not that it appears to be used on the appliance!)
- Reboot the virtual appliance
- If using vSphere the tools should be reported as installed
If you need to reconfigure the VMware tools configuration simply rerun the /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl command as and when required.
Citrix XenServer 6
This is where the fun begins.. Installing the XenTools into the XenServer virtual appliance image is just as easy as VMware Worksstation/vSphere.
- Mount the Citrix XenTools CD/DVD by choosing the “Install XenServer Tools” or manually mount the xs-tools.iso image within XenCenter
- Logon to the HyperDrive console or access the virtual appliance via SSH
- Mount the CD image with mount /dev/cdrom /mnt
- Install XenTools by running /mnt/Linux/install.sh
- Accept all the default prompts
- Reboot the virtual appliance
Once you reboot the appliance you may find that XenCenter still reports that XenTools are still not installed?! After some investigation (and not being a Linux expert) it appears that the kernel used to build the appliance in not paravirtualization (PV) aware, rather in HVM mode. Therefore, without recompiling the kernel it’s impossible to get the XenServer tools installed to support live migrations. Hopefully this is a simple oversight on RES’s part and will be rectified in future builds (I hope!).
In the meantime I will try to find out how to recompile the HyperDrive appliance kernel. I’ll let you if I’m successful but it doesn’t look particularly easy. There appears to be an issue with the configured Nomadesk YUM repository and it won’t retrieve the package list correctly to install the additional kernel. My recommendation at this point would be utilise the VMware appliances wherever possible or live with the fact that you’ll need to shut the HyperDrive appliance down to move it to another host.. 
I’ve not played with the Hyper-V appliance as we have no customers running it but please let me know if it works and how to install them!
