Virtual Machine size and speed
This is more of a general recommendation for about every virtual machine you got: If you operating system has a special virtual edition: use it.
Ubuntu and Suse both have their JeOS editions, Just Enough Operating System. These are special versions of the regular distributions that are geared towards virtualization and are small in size (Ubuntu JeOS has a 300Mb installation size).
Networking woes
The most common problem to occur when you have just deployed a Linux vm from a template is that you have no network. Deploying from a template is actually cloning an existing VM, this causes the VM’s network adapters to have a different MAC address as the VM from which you created the template.
udev allows Linux users to have a dynamic /dev directory and it provides the ability to have persistent device names
The udev system stores its rules in /etc/udev/rules.d, containing among other things a rule for network interfaces. This rule contains the mac address from the network interface, the mac address from the original vm’s network interface. See the problem?
In Debian based distributions the file is called 70-persistent-net.rules. Simply delete this file an during the next boot the network interface will be available again.
VMware Tools
I started writing about VMware tools and how to have a decent strategy when it comes to keeping your VMware tools updated. The text kept getting longer and longer so I decided to make separate post about it.
