bash Cookbook

Testing Scripts in VMware

Problem

You need to develop cross-platform scripts but do not have the appropriate systems or hardware.

Solution

If the target platforms run on the x86 architecture, download the free VMware Server and build your own. Or search for prebuilt virtual machines on the VMware site, the OS vendor or distributor’s site, or the Internet.

The flaw in this solution is the systems such as AIX and HP-UX that don’t run on an x86 architecture, and thus don’t run under VMware. Again, if you have these systems, use them. If not, see the recipe Getting bash Without Getting bash.

Discussion

Testing shell scripts is usually not very resource intensive, so even moderate hard-ware capable of running VMware or a similar virtualization package should be fine. We mention VMware specifically because the Server and Player products are without cost, they run on Linux and Windows (and soon the Mac), and are very easy to use; but there are certainly other alternatives available.

If you install VMware Server on a Linux server, you don’t even need the overhead of a GUI on the host machine—you can use the VNC-based VMware Console from another Linux or Windows machine with a GUI. Minimal virtual machines with 128 MB of RAM, or sometimes even less, should be more than enough for a shell environment for testing. Set up an NFS share to store your test scripts and data, and then simply telnet or ideally SSH to the test system.

To get you started, here’s a trivial example using VMware player:

1. Get the ...