VMware Server 2 Guests randomly fail CentOS 5.4
I recently ran a yum update on my CentOS 5.2 server, which I use to run VMware guests – really you could call it my VMware server. Every time I do this, I think to myself “should I really be doing this? Do I really need the newest kernel on this box that works perfectly?” Then I do it anyway and hope for the best.
This time, however, things did not go for the best.
Immediately after updating and rebooting, VMs went to hell. Guests would suddenly stop for no reason, the web interface kept failing and not responding (although the vmware-hostd service would continue to listen on the ports). I assumed it must be kernel related and dropped back to the last one – but to no avail.
Having no time to fix the issue, and all my VMs on a separate set of disks, I simply reinstalled CentOS from scratch, using the very latest version – 5.4. I thought to myself, “this will surely fix the problems – it’s a fresh OS”. Wrong
Long story short – glibc-2.5-42, which incidentally ships with CentOS 5.4 out of the box, is incompatible with VMware.
Here’s how to get VMWare working on your CentOS 5.4 host:
1. Go to /etc/yum.repos.d and copy the file CentOS-Base.repo to a new file. I chose CentOS53-Base.repo.
2. Edit this new file and rename all instances (in [ ] brackets) with a new name. I.e.
[base] becomes [base53]etc
[updates] becomes [updates53]
3. Replace every instance of $releasever with 5.3.
4. Save the file. Now downgrade glibc:
yum downgrade glibc glibc-common
5. Edit the /etc/yum.conf file and exclude these libraries from future updates, until this is resolved. Do this by adding the following line:
exclude=glibc glibc-common glibc-devel glibc-headers nscd
6. Reboot and re-run vmware-config.pl.
Everything should now work, once more.
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