howtos rocks vmware fusion

Rocks works in VMware for OS X (The Mac version of VMware is call "VMware Fusion")

http://vmware.com/products/fusion/

This is pretty straightforward now-a-days, but here's the step-by-step... If you create the right VMs, a normal Rocks install using CentOS or RHEL works fine. No special flags or instructions needed.

Steps to create your Frontend:

Launch VMware
File -- New...
Continue

Operating System: Linux
Version: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 64-bit  (choose RHEL 5 for Rocks 5.x)
Continue

Save As: Rocks_Frontend
Where: Choose directory you like using for your VMs
Continue

Disk size: 20 GB   (Rocks 5.1 requires 30 GB)
Continue

Uncheck "Start Virtual machine and install operating system now"
Finish

Now you need to edit your VM a bit...

Click "Memory"
Enter "1024 MB"
Click "Apply"

Click "Network"
Select "Only allow networking with the host (Host Only)"
Click "Apply"

Click "plus sign on lower left corner"
Select "Add Network..."
Select "Connect directly to the physical network (Bridged)"
Click "Apply"

Click "Sound"
Click "minus sign on lower left corner"
Click "Remove"

Click "USB"
Click "minus sign on lower left corner"
Click "Remove"

Click "OK"

Now click on the little "CD" icon on the bottom right and connect either an ISO that includes the Rocks Kernel Roll or
use an actual Rocks CD or DVD, and walk through the Rocks installation process.  For the fully qualified domain name,
use something like "rocks.local".  For the cluster name user something like "rocks".  Add these names to /etc/hosts on
your Mac.  For the IP info, use the defaults for the internal private network and use an IP on the same subnet as your
Mac for the public network.  For instance, I use 192.168.0.200 for my Rocks VM, because my laptop connects to
192.168.0.5 on my office network. The internal 10.1.1.1 network will work fine.

Once your frontend is up, create a couple compute nodes:

File -- New...
Continue

Operating System: Linux
Version: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 64-bit   (choose RHEL 5 for Rocks 5.x)
Continue

Save As: Rocks_Compute-0-0
Where: Choose directory you like using for your VMs
Continue

Disk size: 20 GB (Rocks 5.1 requires 30 GB)
Continue

Uncheck "Start Virtual machine and install operating system now"
Finish

Now you need to edit your VM a bit...

Click "Memory"
Enter "512 MB"
Click "Apply"

Click "Network"
Select "Only allow networking with the host (Host Only)"
Click "Apply"

Click "Sound"
Click "minus sign on lower left corner"
Click "Remove"

Click "USB"
Click "minus sign on lower left corner"
Click "Remove"

Click "OK"

If you are using Rocks 4.3 or above: Power up your VM and go into the BIOS to change the boot order to PXE first.
This is kind of hard to do, because its fast and requires multiple keystrokes, but trust me it works.  You
need to start the machine, click your mouse within the machine right when you see the machine start to
boot -- then click "fn" and "f2" at the same time.  Change to PXE first and Save changes.

Run "insert-ethers" on the frontend and simply power up the compute node VM.
It should drop to PXE boot and load right up. 

Repeat for as many compute nodes as needed.  I recommend 1 frontend and 2 compute nodes for your virtual cluster.

• Note: Watch out for using too much memory and dropping into "swap". A MacBook Pro with 2 GB of RAM is painfully slow if you have all 3 VMs running at once as configured above. I'm mostly using 1 frontend with 1 compute. The second compute is just for some proof of concept stuff.
• UPDATE: After you have installed your frontend, you can drop the memory down to 512 MB. This allows you to run all three VMs simultaneously without dropping into swap on memory starved systems.

VMware Fusion