Streaminghunter598

These scripts, written in Perl, are quite simple in nature. I spend a lot of time cleaning out and exploring preference files when administering Mac OS X machines, and Mac OS X 10.4's propensity. Prl-tools-lin.iso - disc image with Parallels Tools for Linux guest operating systems. Prl-tools-mac.iso - disc image with Parallels Tools for Mac OS X Server Leopard. These disc images can be found in the following location on your Mac: /Library/Parallels/Tools/. In This Section.

Each virtual machine (VM) is an independent system with an independent set of virtual hardware. Its main features are the following:

• A virtual machine resembles and works like a regular computer. It has its own virtual hardware. Software applications can run in virtual machines without any modifications or adjustment.
• Virtual machine configuration can be changed easily, e.g., by adding new virtual disks or memory.
• Although virtual machines share physical hardware resources, they are fully isolated from each other (file system, processes, sysctl variables) and the compute node.
• A virtual machine can run any supported guest operating system.

The following table lists the current virtual machine configuration limits:

A logical CPU is a core (thread) in a multicore (multithreading) processor.

4.4.1. Supported Guest Operating Systems¶

The following guest operating systems have been tested and are supported in virtual machines:

4.4.2. Creating Virtual Machines¶

Before you proceed to creating VMs, check that you have these:

• A guest OS source (see Managing Images):

  • a distribution ISO image of a guest OS to install in the VM, or

  • a template that is a boot volume in the QCOW2 format, or

  • a boot volume

    Note

    To obtain a boot volume, create a volume as described in Managing Compute Volumes, attach it to a VM, install an operating system in it, then delete the VM.

• A storage policy for volumes (see Managing Storage Policies)

• A flavor (see Managing Flavors)

• One or more virtual networks (see Managing Compute Network)

• An SSH key (see Managing SSH Keys)

  Note

  You can specify an SSH key only when creating VMs from a template or boot volume.

Note

Virtual machines are created with the host CPU model by default. Having compute nodes with different CPUs may lead to live migration issues. To avoid them, you can manually set CPU model for all new VMs as described in Setting Virtual Machines CPU Model.

To create a VM, do the following:

1. On the COMPUTE > Virtual machines > VIRTUAL MACHINES tab, click Create virtual machine. A window will open where you will need to specify VM parameters.

2. Specify a name for the new VM.

3. In Deploy from, choose Volume if you have a boot volume or want to create one. Otherwise, choose Image.

4. Depending on your choice, click the pencil icon in the Volumes or Image section and do one of the following:

   • In the Images window, select the ISO image or template and click Done.
   • In the Volumes window, do one of the following:
     • If you have prepared a volume with an installed guest OS, click Attach, find and select the volume, and click Done.

5. Optionally, in the Volumes window, click Add or Attach to create or attach any other volumes you need. To select a volume as bootable, place it first in the list by clicking the up arrow button next to it.

6. After you select an image or a volume, the Placement drop-down list is displayed. Placements are created by the administrator to group nodes or VMs sharing a distinctive feature, like a special license. Select the placement corresponding to the VM characteristics. For more information, see Managing Placements.

7. In the Flavor window, choose a flavor and click Done.

8. In the network window, click Add, select a virtual network interface and click Add. It will appear in the Network interfaces list.

   You can edit additional parameters of newly added network interfaces, like IP and MAC addresses and spoofing protection. To do this, click interface’s ellipsis icon, then Edit, and set parameters in the Edit network interface window.

   You will not be able to edit these parameters later. Instead, you will be able to delete the old network interface and replace it with a new one.

   Click Done.

9. (Optional) If you are deploying the VM from a template or boot volume (not an ISO image), you can specify the following:

   • An SSH key to be injected into the VM. To do it, select an SSH key in the Select an SSH key window, and click Done.

     Note

     To be able to connect to the VM via SSH, make sure the VM template or boot volume has cloud-init and OpenSSH installed (see Preparing Templates).

   • User data to customize the VM after launch. You can specify user data in one of two formats: cloud-config or shell script. To do it, write a script in the Customization script field or browse a file on your local server to load the script from.

     Note

     For the guest OS to be customizable, make sure the VM template or boot volume has cloud-init installed (see Preparing Templates).

     To inject a script in a Windows VM, refer to the Cloudbase-Init documentation. For example, you can set a new password for the account using the following script:

10. Back in the Create virtual machine window, click Deploy to create and boot the VM.

11. If you are deploying the VM from an ISO image (not a boot volume template or a volume with a pre-installed guest OS), select the VM, click Console, and install the guest OS using the built-in VNC console.

12. (Optional) If you are deploying the VM from a prepared template with an injected SSH key, you can connect to it via SSH using the username and the VM IP address:

    • For Linux templates, enter the username that is default for the cloud image OS (for example, for a CentOS cloud image, the default login is centos).
    • For Windows templates, enter the username that you specified during Cloudbase-Init installation.

    For example:

4.4.3. Virtual Machine Actions Overview¶

After you create a virtual machine, you can manage it using the actions available for its current state. To see the full list of available actions, click the ellipsis button next to a VM or on top of its panel. Actions include:

• Run powers up a VM.

• Console connects to running VMs via the built-in VNC console. In the console browser window, you can send a key combination to a VM, take a screenshot of the console window, and download the console log.

• Reboot soft-reboots a running VM.

• Shut down gracefully shuts down a running VM.

• Hard reboot cuts off and restores power, then starts a VM.

• Power off forcibly cuts off power from a VM.

• Shelve unbinds a stopped VM from the node it is hosted on and releases its reserved resources such as CPU and RAM. A shelved VM remains bootable and retains its configuration, including the IP addresses.

  Virtual machines in other states can be shelved by clicking Shut down or Power off and selecting the checkbox Shelve virtual machine in the confirmation window.

• Unshelve spawns a shelved VM on a node with enough resources to host it.

• Suspend saves the current VM state to a file.

  This may prove useful, for example, if you need to restart the host but do not want to quit the applications currently running in the VM or restart its guest OS.

• Resume restores a VM from suspended state.

• Download console log downloads the console log. Make sure logging is enabled inside the VM, otherwise the log will be empty (for more information, see Enabling Logging inside Virtual Machines).

  Examining console logs may be useful in troubleshooting failed virtual machines.

• Reset state resets the VM stuck in a failed or transitional state to its last stable state: active, shut down or shelved.

• Delete removes a VM from the compute cluster.

• Migrate moves a VM to another node in the compute cluster (for more information, see Migrating Virtual Machines).

4.4.4. Enabling Logging inside Virtual Machines¶

VM’s console log will contain log messages only if the TTY1 and TTYS0 logging levels are enabled inside the VM. For example, you can enable them as follows in Linux VMs:

1. Add the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT='console=tty1console=ttyS0' to the file /etc/default/grub.

2. Depending on the boot loader, run either

   or

3. Reboot the VM.

In Windows VMs, you can enable Emergency Management Services (EMS) console redirection for this purpose. Do the following:

1. Start Windows PowerShell with administrator privileges.

2. In the PowerShell console, set the COM port and baud rate for EMS console redirection. As Windows VMs have only the COM1 port with the transmission rate of 9600 bps, run:

3. Enable EMS for the current boot entry:

You may also enable driver status logging to see the list of loaded drivers. This can be useful for troubleshooting a faulty driver or long boot process. You can do this as follows:

1. Start System Configuration with administrator privileges.
2. In the System Configuration windows, open the Boot tab, select the checkboxes OS boot information and Make all boot settings permanent.
3. Confirm the changes and restart the system.

4.4.5. Migrating Virtual Machines¶

VM migration helps facilitate cluster upgrades and workload balancing between compute nodes. Acronis Cyber Infrastructure allows you to perform two types of migration:

• Cold migration for stopped and suspended virtual machines
• Hot migration for running virtual machines (allows you to avoid VM downtime)

For both migration types, a virtual machine is migrated between compute nodes using shared storage, so no block device migration takes place.

Hot migration consists of the following steps:

1. All VM memory is copied to the destination node while the virtual machine keeps running on the source node. If a VM memory page changes, it is copied again.
2. When only a few memory pages are left to copy, the VM is stopped on the source node, the remaining pages are transferred, and the VM is restarted on the destination node.

Large virtual machines with write-intensive workloads write to memory faster than memory changes can be transferred to the destination node, thus preventing migration from converging. For such VMs, the auto-converge mechanism is used. When a lack of convergence is detected during live migration, VM’s vCPU execution speed is throttled down, which also slows down writing to VM memory. Initially, virtual machine’s vCPU is throttled by 20% and then by 10% during each iteration. This process continues until writing to VM memory slows down enough for migration to complete or the VM vCPU is throttled by 99%.

Note

Virtual machines are created with the host CPU model by default. Having compute nodes with different CPUs may lead to live migration issues. To avoid them, you can manually set CPU model for all new VMs as described in Setting Virtual Machines CPU Model.

To migrate a VM, do the following:

1. On the COMPUTE > Virtual machines > VIRTUAL MACHINES tab, click a VM to migrate, click the ellipsis button and choose Migrate.

2. In the new window, specify the destination node:

   • Auto. Automatically select the optimal destination among cluster nodes based on available CPU and RAM resources.
   • Select the destination node manually from the drop-down list.

3. By default, running VMs are migrated live. You can change the migration mode to offline by ticking the Cold migration checkbox. A VM will be stopped and restarted on the destination node after migration.

4. Click Migrate to reserve resources on the destination node and start migration.

The admin panel will show the migration progress.

4.4.6. Reconfiguring and Monitoring Virtual Machines¶

To monitor virtual machine’s CPU, storage, and network usage, select the VM and open the Monitoring tab.

The default time interval for the charts is 12 hours. To zoom into a particular time interval, select the internal with the mouse; to reset zoom, double click any chart.

The following performance charts are available:

CPU / RAM

CPU and RAM usage by the VM.

Network

Incoming and outgoing network traffic.

Storage read/write

Amount of data read and written by the VM.

Read/write latency

Read and write latency. Hovering the mouse cursor over a point on the chart, you can also see the average and maximum latency for that moment as well as the 95 and 99 percentiles.

To reconfigure a VM, select it and, on the Overview tab, click the pencil icon next to a parameter you need to change. You cannot do the following:

• Change, detach, or delete the boot volume
• Manage non-boot volumes except attaching and detaching
• Modify previously added network interfaces
• Attach and detach network interfaces to and from shelved VMs
• Change the flavor for running and shelved VMs

4.4.7. Configuring Virtual Machine High Availability¶

High availability keeps virtual machines operational if the node they are located on fails due to kernel crash, power outage and such or becomes unreachable over the network. Graceful shutdown is not considered a failure event.

Important

The compute cluster can survive the failure of only one node.

In the event of failure, the system will attempt to evacuate affected VMs automatically, that is, migrate them offline with auto-scheduling to other healthy compute nodes in the following order:

• VMs with the “Active” status are evacuated first and automatically started.
• VMs with the “Shut down” status are evacuated next and remain stopped.
• All other VMs are ignored and left on the failed node.

If something blocks the evacuation, for example, destination compute nodes lack resources to host the affected VMs, these VMs remain on the failed node and receive the “Error” status. You can evacuate them manually after solving the issue (providing sufficient resources, joining new nodes to the cluster, etc.). To do this, click the ellipsis button next to such a VM or open its panel and click Evacuate.

When the failed node becomes available again, it is fenced from scheduling new VMs on it and can be returned to operation manually. To do it, click the ellipsis button next to the fenced node or open its panel and then click Return to operation.

By default, high availability for virtual machines is enabled automatically after creating the compute cluster. If required, you can disable it manually as follows:

1. Click the VM for which you wish to disable HA.
2. On the VM panel, click the pencil icon next to the High availability parameter.
3. In the High availability window, disable HA for the VM and click Save.

Virtual machines with disabled HA will not be evacuated to healthy nodes in case of failover.

4.4.8. Managing Guest Tools¶

This section explains how to install and uninstall the guest tools. This functionality is required for Running Commands in Virtual Machines without Network Connectivity, as well as for creating consistent snapshots of a running VM’s disks (refer to Managing Volume Snapshots).

4.4.8.1. Installing Guest Tools¶

Installation of the guest tools inside a virtual machine includes steps performed by users with different roles: a system administrator and a VM user.

As a system administrator, you need to do the following:

1. Upload the guest tools ISO files located in the /usr/share/vz-guest-tools/ directory on any compute node to a network share or FTP server:
   • for a Windows guest, upload vz-guest-tools-win.iso
   • for a Linux guest, upload vz-guest-tools-lin.iso
2. Provide access to the uploaded ISO file to a VM user.

As a VM user, log in to the virtual machine and do the following:

• Inside a Windows VM:

  1. Download the Windows guest tools ISO image provided by your system administrator.
  2. Mount the image inside the VM.
     • On Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 or newer, you can natively mount an ISO image. To do this, right-click the guest tools ISO image and select Mount.
     • On Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008, you need a third-party application to mount ISO images.
  3. Go to the mounted optical drive in Explorer and install the guest tools by running setup.exe.
  4. After the installation is complete, restart the VM.

• Inside a Linux VM:

  1. Download the Linux guest tools ISO image provided by your system administrator.

  2. Create a mount point for the optical drive with the guest tools image and run the installer:

Note

Guest tools rely on the QEMU guest agent that is installed alongside the tools. The agent service must be running for the tools to work.

4.4.8.2. Uninstalling Guest Tools¶

If you find out that the guest tools are incompatible with some software inside a virtual machine, you can uninstall them as follows:

• Inside a Windows VM:

  1. Remove the QEMU device drivers from the device manager.

     Important

     Do not remove the VirtIO/SCSI hard disk driver and NetKVM network driver. Without the former, the VM will not boot; without the latter, the VM will lose network connectivity.

  2. Uninstall the QEMU guest agent and guest tools from the list of installed applications.

  3. Stop and delete Guest Tools Monitor:

  4. Unregister Guest Tools Monitor from Event Log:

  5. Delete the autorun registry key for RebootNotifier:

  6. Delete the C:ProgramFilesQemu-ga directory.

     If VzGuestToolsMonitor.exe is locked, close all the Event Viewer windows. If it remains locked, restart the eventlog service:

  After removing the guest tools, restart the virtual machine.

• Inside a Linux VM:

  1. Remove the packages:

     1. On RPM-based systems (CentOS and other):

     2. On DEB-based systems (Debian and Ubuntu):

        If any of the packages listed above are not installed on your system, the command will fail. In this case, exclude these packages from the command and run it again.

  2. Remove the files:

  3. Reload the udev rules:

  After removing guest tools, restart the virtual machine.

Parallels Support team guest authors: Dineshraj Yuvaraj

When you set up your first virtual machine in Parallels Desktop for Mac, you may have noticed Parallels Tools installing automatically (in the guest operating system). So what is Parallels Tools and why is it that important for Windows/Linux/Mac VMs in Parallels Desktop? Why is it installing automatically? How do I know if it’s installed or not? In this blog, I will answer these questions and more. Read on!

What is Parallels Tools?

Parallels Tools is a set of drivers for the guest OS that is installed in your VM. It helps you use your virtual environments in the most comfortable and efficient way.

You can move the mouse seamlessly between the VM and your Mac, change the VM’s screen resolution simply by resizing its window, synchronize your VM’s time and date settings with the host OS, share your Mac disks and folders with its VMs, and copy text and drag and drop objects from Mac OS to a VM and vice versa. Visit this page of the User Guide to review all the features managed by Parallels Tools.

What if Parallels Tools is not installed?

Although you technically can run the guest OS without Parallels Tools, you will lose important functionality targeted primarily at two-OS integration.

How do I know if Parallels Tools is installed?

With Parallels Tools installed, you can move the cursor between the virtual machine and Mac; the mouse and keyboard are released automatically. One of the easy ways to detect that Parallels Tools is not installed is to start your VM and look at the status bar of its window. If the tip “Press Ctrl + Alt to release the mouse and keyboard” appears in the status bar of the VM’s window, this means that Parallels Tools is not currently installed.

Parallels Tools location on Mac

While you likely won’t need to locate the Parallels Tools image for Windows VMs manually, you might need to know the location for Linux and Mac OS images, as you need to mount them if automatic installation did not work for some reason. Here is how these images appear:

prl-tools-win.iso – Image for Parallels Tools for Windows guest operating systems

prl-tools-lin.iso – Image for Parallels Tools for Linux guest operating systems

prl-tools-mac.iso – Image for Parallels Tools for Mac OS X

These images can be found in the following location on your Mac:

/Applications/Parallels Desktop.app/Contents/Resources/Tools

Although you may have already installed Parallels Tools at the VM setup stage, let me walk you through the steps you need to take in case it is not yet installed on your guest OS.

How to install Parallels Tools in a Windows virtual machine

1. Start your VM and log in to Windows.

2. When Windows boots up, click on the Actions menu (Parallels Desktop 10 and later) at the top, or the Virtual Machine menu (Parallels Desktop 9 and earlier) and select Install Parallels Tools.

3. Open up the CD-ROM and click on Parallels Tools to start the automatic install.

4. When the installation is complete, your VM will restart automatically.

How to install Parallels Tools in a Linux virtual machine

1. Start the Linux and open the Terminal window.
2. Get the administrator’s / root privileges:

sudo su or su

3. Make sure the DVD drive in the Linux VM is ejected:

eject /dev/cdrom

4. Go to the Parallels Desktop menu bar > Devices > CD/DVD > Connect image…

Navigate to /Applications/Parallels Desktop/Contents/Resources/Tools.

Click on prl-tools-lin.iso and click Open.

5. Mount the Parallels Tools image to the Linux VM:

mkdir /media/cdrom

mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom

6. Make sure the disk image has been successfully mounted:

ls /media/cdrom

It should list the files located on the disk:

install* installer/ install-gui* kmods/ tools/ version

7. Go to the Parallels Tools image and run the installation package:

cd /media/cdrom

./install

Prl Tools Mac Iso Download Iso

How to install Parallels Tools in a Mac OS virtual machine

1. Start the VM and log in to the guest OS.

2. When the guest OS boots up, connect the Parallels Tools .iso image file by choosing Install Parallels Tools from the Actions menu at the top (Parallels Desktop 10 and later) or Virtual Machine menu (Parallels Desktop 9 and earlier).

3. In the VM, open Parallels Tools and double-click Install to start the installation.

4. In the Welcome window, click Continue, and follow the installation wizard prompts.

5. When the installation is complete, click Restart to exit the assistant and restart your VM.

Hope this blog helps you understand Parallels Tools! Please free to share your comments below, and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for more Parallels tips.

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