# Installation and Configuration Guide

# Working with WLS-VE Using VirtualCenter

The VMware VirtualCenter, a component of VMware Infrastructure 2.0, is a graphical view into WLS-VE. It allows you to provision virtual machines and monitor performance of physical servers and virtual machines. VirtualCenter can optimize resources, ensure high availability to all applications running on virtual machines and improve the responsiveness of your IT environment with virtualization-based distributed services.

This section provides an overview of VirtualCenter to help you familiarize yourself with its components and some of its uses. This section is not intended as a VirtualCenter user guide beyond functionality that is specific to WLS-VE. For complete information on this product, we strongly recommend that you refer to the VMware Infrastructure Documentation at `http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vi_pubs.html`

This chapter contains information on these subjects:

- Setting Up VMware and Enabling SSL
- Starting (and Stopping) WLS-VE
- Editing VM Properties
- Pausing a VM
- Working with the Console Tab

## Setting Up VMware and Enabling SSL

For information about installing VMware VirtualCenter, see the VMware Installation and Upgrade Guide.

To use SSL with VirtualCenter (which is strongly recommended), you must install the VMware Web Service. The VMware Web Service is installed by default when you choose the typical installation for VirtualCenter. For information about how to set up the VMware Web Service and verify that it is operating correctly, see the VMware Installation and Upgrade Guide. See also the Developing Client Applications chapter of the VMware Infrastructure SDK Programming Guide.

## Starting (and Stopping) WLS-VE

You can start an existing WLS-VE instance from VirtualCenter one of three ways:

- Click the Play button.
- Click Power On in the Commands box.
- Right-click a machine on the Hosts and Clusters list and select Power On from the context menu that appears.

If you stop WLS-VE, you risk losing any underlying server connections, with no guarantee that these connections will be restored when the machine is restarted. For this reason, stopping WLS-VE using VirtualCenter is not recommended. If you must stop WLS-VE, follow the instructions for doing so in Stopping WLS-VE .

For more detailed information on starting (and stopping) a machine from VirtualCenter, please refer to Starting WLS-VE.

## Editing VM Properties

You can edit the properties of a running virtual machine on the fly from within VirtualCenter. To do so, either:

- Click Edit Settings in the Commands box

OR

- Right-click a machine on the Hosts and Clusters list and select Edit Settings from the context menu that appears.

The Virtual Machine Properties window appears (Figure 10-1).

Figure 10-1 Virtual Machine Properties Window

This window is divided into three tabs, each providing access to certain groups of properties that you can edit, as described in Table 10-1. Unless otherwise specified, you can edit any of the values on these tabs so long as those properties are enabled for your VM.

Table 10-1 Virtual Machine Properties Tabs
Tab | Properties
--- | ---
Hardware | These properties can be changed: Memory: Amount of memory allocated to the VM CPUs: the number of virtual processors used by this machine These properties cannot be changed: CD/DVD Drive: The path and filename of the machine's `.iso` file (there can be more than one drive) Network Adapter: the device status, adapter label, and device type used by this machine (there can be more than one network adapter) SCSI Controller: information about the SCSI controller, if any is used Hard Disk: information about the virtual hard disk used by this machine, including disk size, disk file name, device node, and operational mode (there can be more than one hard disk)
Options | General: information about the VM in use, including its name, configuration file, working location, and guest operating system VMware Tools: identifies which VMware power controls are available to this machine and allows the user to select any scripts to run with the machine Power Management: allows the user to define how the VM should behave when the guest operating system is placed on standby Advanced: allows the user to set such advanced properties as whether or not to expose the No flag, enable logging, and set advanced configuration parameters
Resources | CPU: allows the user to allocate resources to the CPU Memory: allows the user to allocate memory resources Disk: allows the user to reallocate hard disk resources Advanced CPU: allows the user to permit or deny sharing of physical CPU cores when the host supports hyperthreading and to select physical processor affinity for the VM

For details on how to use the Virtual Machine Properties window to edit VM settings, please refer to the VMware document, Basic System Administration, at:

`http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_admin_guide.pdf`

## Pausing a VM

Pausing, or hibernating, a VM causes it to stop running while allowing all other processes to continue. You can pause a VM either by clicking the Pause button or by right-clicking a running machine in the Hosts & Clusters list and selecting Suspend from the context menu that appears.

You should be very careful when pausing a VM and only use this function when absolutely necessary. When you pause a VM instance while you have open connections to the server, you risk losing these connections when you awaken the VM. The resultant unpredictable behavior might cause these connections to be reset.

## Working with the Console Tab

While most of the VirtualCenter tabs are fairly straightforward in their use, the Console tab does support certain functions specific to WLS-VE. This section describes those functions.

### Inactive Keyboard

When you click in the Console tab, most keys on your keyboard will disabled and your mouse pointer will disappear. You can use the key sequences listed in Table 10-2 to perform certain functions when the console is open:

Table 10-2 VirtualCenter Console Tab Key Sequences
Press... | To...
--- | ---
Ctrl-Break | Force a stack trace.
Ctrl-C | To shut down LiquidVM.
Ctrl-Alt | Reactivate your mouse pointer.
F1 | Display environmental information.
F10 | Collect application profile data. To use this key: First, ensure that you have applied a load to the application. Press F10 once to start a data collection. Press F10 a second time to display the information you collected.

### Console Log

Text written to the console also gets written to a log file. This log file is normally stored in the current working directory as seen from inside the WLS-VE instance. By default, that is `/domain` (that is, your domain directory on the NFS server). The default name of the file is `<vmname>``.log`. You can change the name of the log file by setting the parameter `LVM_CONSOLE_LOG` in the startup script (see WLS-VE Configuration Properties for instructions on setting properties in the start-up script).

### Pre-console Log

Before the LiquidVM has a network connection it cannot write to the log file because it needs a network connection to do so. If something were to fail during initialization, you might still want to see what happened without having to use Virtual Infrastructure Client. WLS-VE supports such monitoring with the help of the WLS-VE launcher. After the WLS-VE is launched, the launcher continues to monitor the log-in process for five seconds and then requests the data written to the console during those first five seconds. This request uses the VMware communication channels that don't require networking to be set up, hence the WLS-VE launcher will get machine log even if networking initialization has failed.