gridappliance intallation issue with virtual box

[miller cheung]

Hi guys,

I failed to boot appliance using virtual box with grid-appliance-
archer-i386.zip (Grid Appliance 2.04.04) even with a "fresh" one. But
virtual box works well with the old version of the appliance zipped
file ga2.zip (Grid Appliance 2.03.00). It seems that floppy.img in
2.04.04 is not compatible with virtual box.

For VMware, everything is OK. But I did meet the problem "cannot open
a file larger than 2GB". The solution is add
"diskLib.sparseMaxFileSizeCheck= "false"" to the end of the file "Grid
Appliance.vmx".

Hope it can give some help to those who are new to gridappliance like
me:)

[David Isaac Wolinsky]

Thanks!

Though I have some questions, since we have tested this in Linux and
Windows using both VirtualBox and VMWare [Player,Server] and never come
across this issue, I'm left suspecting that there may be something
unusual about your setup. When I looked up what that parameter does
(diskLib.sparseMaxFileSizeCheck= "false"), I found this: "disables WS6
overeager filesystem check - (prevents using disks via drivers for
ext2/3 on Windows or ntfs on Linux ...)" (source:
http://sanbarrow.com/vmx/vmx-advanced.html).

So please let us know your OS version and FS that the VMDK is stored
on. Also if you could share the error messages VirtualBox gave you.

Regards,
David

[miller cheung]

Thanks.

I met "cannot open a file larger than 2GB" only when using VMware and
when I added "diskLib.sparseMaxFileSizeCheck= "false"" then it works.
I do this on my laptop with window xp, the file system is FAT32.

When I use virtual box, "This is not a bootable disk. Please insert a
bootable floppy and press any key to try again ..." appears. I
followed the steps on http://www.grid-appliance.org/wiki/index.php/VirtualBox_How_To
. (I guess this might be too old for Grid Appliance 2.04.04 as the
files are different from 2.03.00 or I didn't find the right
tutorial?)

I noticed floppy is no longer supported(http://groups.google.com/group/
archer-users-group/browse_thread/thread/11d1eb31850bacad). Does that
mean that I should boot hard disk first?

Thanks so much for your help.

Yequn

[David Isaac Wolinsky]

I see, the underlying issue is the use of FAT32.  FAT limits files to 2 GB, the Grid Appliance image can grow as large as 8 GB, thus the reason why its failing unless you explicitly disable that check.  When constructing the appliance, I assumed that most users would be using NTFS, since its Windows XP default, or pretty much any other modern FS, which all support files bigger than 2 GB.  I'll definitely add this to the FAQ, but I'm not certain if split VMDK disks work, yet, in VirtualBox and KVM, thus the reason why we use a single disk image.

That wiki entry needs to be updated.  Floppys are still used but only for configuration.  You should definitely boot from hard disk first.  I'm looking into adding a tweak to the floppy to have it trigger booting from the hard disk.

Regards,
David

On 07/08/2010 03:08 PM, miller cheung wrote:

Thanks.

I met "cannot open a file larger than 2GB" only when using VMware and
when I added "diskLib.sparseMaxFileSizeCheck= "false"" then it works.
I do this on my laptop with window xp, the file system is FAT32.

When I use virtual box, "This is not a bootable disk. Please insert a
bootable floppy and press any key to try again ..." appears. I
followed the steps on http://www.grid-appliance.org/wiki/index.php/VirtualBox_How_To
. (I guess this might be too old for Grid Appliance 2.04.04 as the
files are different from 2.03.00 or I didn't find the right
tutorial?)

I noticed floppy is no longer supported(http://groups.google.com/group/
archer-users-group/browse_thread/thread/11d1eb31850bacad). Does that
mean that I should boot hard disk first?

Thanks so much for your help.

Yequn