Rich Waters

After a quick start with the rPath LAMP appliance last week. I set off to find a simple Rails setup for development and testing. I was unable to find any up to date pre-built image that supported rails so I figured I’d build my own. VMWare player doesn’t really do anything to help build vm images so I took the jump over to VMware server.

I’ve played around with VMware server a bit in the past, ever since they offered it up free of charge. Since they recently released 2.0 beta I figured I’d give that a try. The new beta has replaced the old admin app with a slick new web interface. Even taking control over a vm is moved into a java control within the web interface, the first time you connect in it downloads a small browser plugin, but from then on you can control everything right within the browser. Pretty Impressive.

Setup is pretty much the same, you walk through a little wizard that lets you configure the various hardware (processor, ram, network, hard drive, etc) once you’ve built a shell vm you can mount an iso into the cd-rom and install the OS just as you would on a physical machine. Rather than download a different image (iso) I just grabbed what I had handy and installed Ubuntu 7.10 desktop edition. Everything installed very smoothly. After the box came back up I installed apache, ruby, rubygems, rails, mongrel, mongrel_cluster, and several other gems. I whipped up a quick sample app and pointed the apache configuration at it. With everything installed it probably only took 30 minutes of work and a couple hours just letting it install things… not bad. Also in the process I moved over the original rPath LAMP image to the new VMware server so that they’re all in the same place.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Misc, Rails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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