VMWare and VMWare Player Licensing

[Ric_]

I'm trying to get this straight in my head because I intend to use it for sandboxing software trials.

Am I right in thinking that you could buy 1 license of VMWare Workstation to produce an image containing a basic install of Windows and then deploy this to say 60 laptops using the VMWare Player?

If I was to do this, would the player lose all the changes when exited?

[Geoff]

You can also use QEMU, which is GPL, to create images for VMWare Player.

As I understand it you can chose if you want to save the changes back to the image.

[Ric_]

@Geoff: Would that not have licensing implications though? I shoulod have sufficient funds to license as much software as needed for this - it's an SLT demanded thing

I think that I will create a syspreped image that the staff can open but they will need to be able to write changes back to this image while they do a 30-day trial, for example.

I've kind of discounted Virtual PC because one license for VMWare Workstation costs less than 7 copies of VirtualPC and (if it works like I think) I can see at least one person in each department wanting to use it to trial software.

[Geoff]

I'm confused. Do you mean VMware licensing (you don't need one for player AFAIK)? Or the software on the image (normal rules apply)?

[Ric_]

I mean VMWare licensing.

I got bored reading the License Agreements (yes... there's several) for the Player and although they didn't specifically mention that you MUST use a VMWare product, they didn't say the you COULD use another product.

Also, does anybody else actually do this?

[Geoff]

AFAIK it doesn't matter how you generate the image. Your free to use QEMU to create VMWare player compatible images and not pay a dime.

I've produced a Gentoo Linux VMWare image with QEMU but not much else so far.

[Ric_]

I've created an image using a demo of VMWare Workstation and copied it onto a user's laptop along with an install of VMWare Player. It seems to work as I planned - closing the Window simply suspends the virtual machine by default.

I will further look into Qemu - I had to just get it sorted ASAP for this one guy to trial.

I would imagine that I would probably begin using VMWare quite a bit myself and the Workstation version must be more efficient when running multiple instances than having several copies of the Player open.

[DMcCoy]

Just in case anyone is interested, this is what the grown up version is like



All the vms are running on a single blade atm (6 total), I'm in the middle of creating all the new vms to move the current services over to.


David