Hunting down where a VM is hiding is not always quick and easy without some copious planning. Maybe you’re doing support services on an in-house thin client cluster, or you’re debugging some webserver on some regional node. And every day you’re logging into random virtual machines, trying to keep your SSH keys all in order, or worse, deploying LDAP client configurations just so you can log in for five minutes. Maybe just one, but probably more than one, and maybe way too many. Why use packet capture in a virtual environment? We became aware of a vmnet-sniffer command that comes with VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion, which we use on our OS X workstations for development, and realized that it’s a great tool for capturing on virtual machines or in a cloud environment when used with CloudShark for analysis.

With Vagrant, we can test every permutation of CloudShark via a barrage of automated testing.Īlong the way, we had to learn some of the lower level interfaces of these tools. One of the most powerful tools we use when testing CloudShark is a combination of VMware Workstation and the Vagrant API interface.

Cloudshark packet capture