MindTouch Virtual Appliance Installation for ESX 3.x

Get the Virtual Appliance

Note: If you have ESX 3.5, MindTouch can be imported directly from the new VMWare Virtual Appliance Marketplace! Instructions can be found here: MindTouch Deki Virtual Appliance Marketplace Installation Guide

If the Virtual Appliance Marketplace is not available, use the following steps:

Download virtual appliance from http://wiki.mindtouch.com, and extract contents of the zip file to a temporary location.

Using your preferred file transfer mechanism, e.g. ftp, scp, etc., copy the virtual machine files (*.vmx, *.vmsd, *.vmdk) from your local system to an ext3 formatted partition (not the VMFS3 volume where the files will ultimately reside) on the ESX host.

On the VMware ESX Server 3.x system where the virtual machine will be hosted, log in to the Service Console and navigate to the VMFS3 volume where the virtual machine files will be located. Create a new subdirectory for the files called “deki”. For example, on a VMFS3 volume named “myvmfs3”:

# mkdir /vmfs/volumes/myvmfs3/deki 

Copy all of the files except for the virtual disk (the vmdk file) file from the ext3 partition to the newly created directory on the VMFS3 volume. For example, to copy the files to a VMFS3 volume named “myvmfs3”, if the files were originally placed in the /tmp ext3 partition (Note:{version info} would be replaced with the version of MindTouch that you downloaded) :

# cp /tmp/Deki_{version info}_VM.vmx /vmfs/volumes/myvmfs3/deki

Update the permissions on the configuration(vmx)file to include execute permissions for user, group, and other using the Linux chmod command. Navigate to the virtual machine’s directory, e.g. /vmfs/volumes/myvmfs3/deki and enter:

# chmod 755 Deki_Wiki_{version info}_VM.vmx

Import the virtual machine disk file into VMFS

Import the virtual machine’s virtual disk (vmdk) file from the ext3 partition to the VMFS3 volume
using the clone (import) function of the ESX vmkfstools utility. There are two interrelated
considerations to be made when performing this operation:

• To maximize disk I/O performance with no concern about the amount of physical disk
  utilized initially, use the default virtual disk format. The virtual disk file will be fully inflated
  to consume the configured 30 gigabytes and will not grow beyond that size. This fully-allocated
  disk format is the ESX default and is called “zeroed-thick”. Note that it will also take
  significantly longer to clone to this format.

• To utilize a minimal amount of disk space initially, which will result in a small I/O
  performance degradation, use the thin virtual disk format. The virtual disk file will initially
  consume approximately 2 gigabytes and will grow up to 30 gigabytes as additional disk is required.
  This allocate-on-use disk format is called “thin”.

The format of the vmkfstools utility for the clone function is as follows:

vmkfstools –i source_file [–d file_format] destination_file

Assuming the source ext3 partition is /tmp and the destination VMFS3 volume is named “myvmfs3”,
then the command would appear as follows for each of the two aforementioned options (note that the destination includes the VMFS3 volume name and the subdirectory that was created in earlier):

# vmkfstools –i /tmp/Deki_Wiki_{version info}_VM.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/myvmfs3/deki/Deki_Wiki_{version info}_VM.vmdk

# vmkfstools –i /tmp/Deki_Wiki_{version info}_VM.vmdk –d thin /vmfs/volumes/myvmfs3/deki/Deki_Wiki_{version info}_VM.vmdk

# rm /tmp/Deki_Wiki_{version info}_VM.*