Installing MeetingPlace Express 2.0 on VMWare

I recently had the need to build a test installation of MeetingPlace Express on our VMware environment. The process is not officially supported by Cisco as it is for Communications Manager, Unity, and Presence. Here are the modifications I made ot the installation to trick it into installing on VMware:

1. Create a VM for MeetingPlace express. I created mine with 4 GB of RAM, 2 processors, 2 NICs, and a 90GB hard drive.

2. Extract a MeetingPlace installation DVD into a directory on a Linux machine # mount /media/cdrecorder # mkdir /scr/MPX # cd /scr/MPX # tar -cf – /media/cdrecorder | tar -xvf -

3. Edit the following files to short-circuit the platform and hard drive checks: Cisco/base_scripts/check_platform.sh Cisco/vendor/misc/bin/hw_setup.sh In both cases, I simply put an “exit 0″ on its own line immediately after the #!/bin/bash at the top of each file. The exit 0 immediately exits the script with a successful error code and avoids the nasty “Platform not Supported” message.

4. Re-roll an .iso file with your new information # cd /scr/MPX # chmod a+w isolinux/isolinux.bin # mkisofs -r -T -J -b isolinux/isolinux.bin \ -c isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 \ -boot-info-table -o /scr/MPX-VMWARE.iso /scr/MPX/ When you get through the OS installation, the VM will reboot. The firstboot script will prompt you to insert the Cisco Application DVD to install the MeetingPlace application. For me, I couldn’t use my “custom” DVD for this step. My original MeetingPlace Express installation DVD was recognized and installed the application successfully.

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One Response to Installing MeetingPlace Express 2.0 on VMWare

  1. Kevin says:

    I am trying to run MPE 2.0.3 with the file changes you mentioned. I have done that but the install is still failing on platform. I even cleaned out the entire file below the exit 0 with no luck. Any idea if there is another file for this version I need to edit?

    Thanks.