Virtual Machines for SAS

SAS 11.0.0 Virtual Machine for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, 32 and 64 bit

We aimed to help users runnning exclusively Microsoft Windows, without having to develop a native version of SAS on such platform based on the Cygwin environment. That is why since SAS 7.0.0 we provide the SAS built natively on Linux installed within a Linux Virtual Machine, a package we have called "Virtual Machine for SAS" (VM4SAS).

A virtual machine (VM) is a software that allows to run an operating system inside another (the host). The VM's technology used here is VMWare which is well known since several years ago. VMWare is a comercially licensed software but thanks to its free VMWare player product, it is now possible to deploy and run any specific VM bundled to a particular software on almost any host operating system, something known as a "Virtual Appliance". VM4SAS is from that point of view a Virtual Appliance.

VM4SAS11

With SAS 11 we offer for the first time, two flavours of VM4SAS: One for the Linux 32 bit kernel, named VM4SAS11-32 and one for the 64 bit kernel, named VM4SAS11-64.

VM4SAS11-32 contain a Fedora 14 32 bit Virtual Machine downloaded from the Thoughtpolice.co.uk repository of Virtual Machines, running a 32 bit Fedora 14 kernel. The image contains the SAS 11.0.0 (xmmsas_20110223_1801) release natively built on Linux Fedora 12 32 bit kernel(Fedora12-32), already installed plus the external software tools required to work with SAS, ds9 6.2, grace 5.1.22, heasoft 6.10, and the reduced set of CCF.

VM4SAS11-64 contain a Fedora 14 64 bit Virtual Machine downloaded from the Thoughtpolice.co.uk repository of Virtual Machines. The image contains the SAS 11.0.0 (xmmsas_20110223_1801) release natively built on Linux Fedora 8 64 bit kernel(Fedora8-64), already installed plus the external software tools required to work with SAS, ds9 6.2, grace 5.1.22, heasoft 6.10, and the reduced set of CCF.

SAS 11.0.0 has been installed under the following directory of the virtual machine: /usr/local/sas/xmmsas_201102423_1801.

Hardware and Sofware requirements

In order to install this software in Microsoft Windows you need:

• At least 9 GB of free disk space.
• At least 1 GB of RAM to run it.
• A display with at least a resolution of 1024x768.
• VMWare Player for your host operating system (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, etc). Free downloads are available in here.
• The 7zip software to ucompress the VM4SAS11-32.7z or the VM4SAS11-64.7zcompressed files.

Installation instructions

Download and install first the VMWare Player for your host OS, e.g. for MS Windows. Once done, download and unpack in your disk the compressed VM4SAS11-32.7z or the VM4SAS11-64.7z file containing the virtual machine components (notice that the 7z files are about 4 GByte). As a result of the unpack you should get a folder named VM4SAS11-32 for the 32 bit falvour or VM4SAS11-64 for the 64 bit, with about 14 files in it. At this point you may wish to remove the 7z file to save disk space.

Running the virtual machine

To start the virtual machine, just simply double click the mouse on the icon for the file SAS11.vmx within the VM4SAS10 folder. Alternatively you may start the VMWare Player and select the File Menu, then select the Open option and choose the mentioned file in the referred folder.

Depending on the version you have selected, the VM will boot either the Fedora 14 32 bit kernel vmlinuz-2.6.35-50.fc14.i386 or the Fedora 14 64 bit kernel vmlinuz-2.6.35.6-45.fc14.x86_64.

Once the VM is up and running, you need to log in into it as you would do for a real Linux system. For this purpose we have provided a predefined user to run SAS whose name is xmmsas with password xmmsas. The administrator (whose name is root in Linux) has the same password.

Running SAS

To run SAS proceed as for any other platform. First initialize the SAS environment by sourcing the respective script which is provided in the installation of SAS. For the xmmsas Bash shell, this is done as follows

. /usr/local/sas/xmmsas_20110223_1801/setsas.sh

Alternately you may use as well

. $HOME/setsas.sh

CCF files are provided within the VM under the /ccf directory. Please set the respective SAS_CCFPATH environment variable having this into account.

External Software included

The following packages required to work with SAS 10.0.0, are included:

• Heasoft 6.10. Installed in /usr/local/heasoft-6.10. Remeber to initialize it before SAS.
• ds9 6.2 (includes xpa 2.1.13). Available in /usr/local/ds9.
• grace 5.1.22. Installed as a Linux rpm package. Available under /usr/bin.

Display settings

The virtual machine is configured to use a screen resolution of 1024x768 by default. This means that you at least need such a physical display resolution. If your physical display admits a bigger resolution, you can change the configured screen size at your convenience. If your physical display is smaller you still might start the virtual machine and change the virtual screen size until it fits in the physical size. However, using resolutions below 1024x768 is highly discouraged if you pretend to use SAS interactively.

Network settings

VMware Player is able to use the pysical network interface available in your PC to provide a virtual network interface to the virtual machine. Hence, if your PC has an active Internet connection, you should be able to access the Internet from inside the virtual machine without major problems.

Support

The VM is provided as is. We will not provide official support on the VM software nor on any other aspect related to it on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. However, support is foreseen to solve minor problems or doubts related with using SAS in this environment, which might be reported by users throught the XMM-Newton HelpDesk. By using the same mean we are open to suggestions and modifications for subsequent VM4SAS releases.