VMWare and WorldGroup 2.0 woes.

VeNoM · Post by **VeNoM** » Mon Aug 25, 2008 10:23 pm

I've got an active WG2 system up and running on its own dedicated hardware. Its working well, and I have plenty of active users.

In the interest of consolidation, and mangement, i'd like to take my board, and move it into a VM. I currently have two bbs's running, one is a copy of the live board that i use to test things on. In a perfect world, i should be able to move them both into Vm's on the same machine, consolidating them for management purposes, and it should even conserve a bit of power. I have a handful of other unrelated machines running that could also be added to VM's later to futher clean up the NOC i have in my basement.

Basically, i'd like to replace all of the machines down there with one sturdy VM server.

I've been working with VMWare, and VMWare's ESX server quite a bit on job related things. So i'm pretty familiar with both.

I've been able to setup a VM, install DOS, and get a fresh install of WG2 running, but i run into random issues. Sometimes i'll run out of interrupt stacks, sometimes i'll get memory dumped to the screen, sometimes the vm just reboots.

Now that you know my story. i guess i'll get to the point.

Has anyone succesfully setup a live WG2 BBS, stable, in a VM?

I run WG2, with Vircomm's MajorTCP for telnet/ftp/whatnot. A few modules, like TW2002, and Tele-Arena, 32 telnet lines.

Seems most of my issues are hardware/resources related. Any suggestions on how i can get some of this working a bit more stable?

Thanks!

VeNoM · Post by **VeNoM** » Wed Aug 27, 2008 11:37 am

Seems I've had some better luck this time around.

I setup a fresh VM, with a clean install of Dos, WG2, and MajorTCP.
Seems to be working! It's not on vmware's esx, seems that theyre not interested in DOS applications in ESX, cant imagine why.

At any rate, seems to be working, i just need some faster hardware to back it up. The board's more than a but sluggish in the VM.

Malakai · Post by **Malakai** » Thu Aug 28, 2008 2:01 am

VMWARE can be very finicky with dos and major bbs. Some computers are terribly unstable, yet others with the same exact software configuration run extremely stable.

I've got about 15 PCs I use for testing this and that out, and it took some time to actually find one that would work correctly for me. After major bbs runs for about a week or so, it will run out of memory. So, as long as you reboot the pc every 4-5 days, it should be fine.

The best thing about vmware and mbbs is that all you have to do to backup the board is to take the virtual drive down and copy the one image file to either another hard drive or a cd/dvd burner, and put it right back up. Minimum downtime, etc. You can also set it up to run on wifi, with out having to buy a wifi bridge.

VeNoM · Post by **VeNoM** » Thu Aug 28, 2008 2:11 am

Yea, i kinda got the feeling that WG and VMWare didnt get along well.

Do i need to reboot the VM every so often? Or the host PC?

Malakai · Post by **Malakai** » Sat Aug 30, 2008 3:21 am

I reboot the whole PC, but I'm not sure if just restarting vmware would free up the memory or not. Rick would probably know about this better than I.

I use an older version of vmware, for better performance and stability, in my own experience. Again, the newer vmware may work better for some configurations.

Pen · Post by **Pen** » Tue Sep 23, 2008 7:01 am

I have WG2 running on VM-server 1.04 with no issues - apart from being a bit slow due to the polling using all the CPU.

It's been running for 45 days since the last reboot and I don't touch it.

I would love to get the CPU down though.

VeNoM · Post by **VeNoM** » Thu Jul 30, 2009 8:48 pm

Thread from the dead!

Just wanted to throw in some info here.

I've been playing with vmware-server 2, and it's not working out. See my documentation Here.

Stoneslinger76 · Post by **Stoneslinger76** » Fri Jul 31, 2009 9:05 am

VeNoM wrote:Thread from the dead!

Just wanted to throw in some info here.

I've been playing with vmware-server 2, and it's not working out. See my documentation Here.

Have you tried tweaking variations of hardware CFG, I had some unusual reults with 4800/N/N even though multitask inviroment worked, then increased port speed.

System poll rate Auto/4800/9600/19200/38400
Need to run under deskview Y/N
should software accelerator routine be activated Y/N

VeNoM · Post by **VeNoM** » Sat Aug 01, 2009 1:06 am

I'm tinkering with a copy of my live wg2 board now, copied into vmware.

The gp's on multiple logins thing is gone, must be somehow related to the setup of my live board vs the new board it setup for testing in the vm.

However, i keep running into an "Out of interrupt stacks" error.

I just tried disabling software acceleration, we'll see if that helps.

dprusak · Post by **dprusak** » Sat Aug 01, 2009 9:05 am

I've been able to get mbbs working very well using virtualbox. The key for me was to turn off vtx. Some reason, vtx and himem.sys does not play well together.

After I got that working mbbs seems to run nicely. It does crash like once a week, but back in the day, the bbs on the real hardware used to crash like once a week, so meh, no difference there.

Stoneslinger76 · Post by **Stoneslinger76** » Sat Aug 01, 2009 9:19 am

VeNoM wrote:I'm tinkering with a copy of my live wg2 board now, copied into vmware.

The gp's on multiple logins thing is gone, must be somehow related to the setup of my live board vs the new board it setup for testing in the vm.

However, i keep running into an "Out of interrupt stacks" error.

I just tried disabling software acceleration, we'll see if that helps.

Usually a memorey shortage, think increaseing files= and buffers= will help. I dont run vmware so not sure if the setting applies, but wg2 dos I run
files=120 and buffers=90 (in config.sys)