VMWare

[20RickY06]

hiya...im doing an IT Technician training course and one of the instructors said that VMWare is a good virtual server program that can help me get used to servers...was just wondering what specs do i need?...can i use just 1 machine?...is it easy to set up?...any advice will be helpful...cheers...

[Dos_Box]

You can use VMWare free for 30 days trial of download Microsofts Virtual PC fro free (VMWare is far better though).
You will need a faily modern PC with at least (IMHO) a 2.5 GHZ processor and above and a minimum of 1GB RAM to use the machines effectively. A hard drive of 100GB+ is recommended, especially if you are going to create several virtual machines. If you have a REALLY beefy PC you can even run a virtual LAN with Server 2003, Linux and XP all running at once. Virtually. Dammed good fun.

[plexer]

I thought VMWare server was free too?

Ben

[20RickY06]

yeah it is free but as my instructor said its 30 day free trial but u can un-install and re-install but this causes you to loose everything...ermm...i have a rather crap processor atm but will get a better one soon...i got 1gb memory and a 60gb harddrive but ill be getting a 300gb soon aswell....should i wait untill its upgraded before i try anything with vmware?...also if i seem to have problems using it would anyone help me?...thanks...

[plexer]

http://www.vmware.com/products/server/faqs.html

Says nothing about it being 30 day trial only.

VMWare workstation is still a paid for product.

As would ESX and the other server versions.

Ben

[Geoff]

Yep, VMWare Player and VMWare Server are both free.

[theriver]

Hi.

I used to use Virtual PC (bought a copy this time last year, d'oh!), but have dropped it in favour of VMWare.

VMWare Server is free, with no time limit, and despite the name runs on XP Pro and Home.

VMWare Workstation comes in an evaluation edition, with a 30 day limit.

I run VMWare Server on my year old Windows XP Pro AMD 3000+, and used it recently to run a test hosting a couple of Windows 2003 servers and 2 clients running concurrently. Not lightening fast, obviously, but usable and certainly under the low load of a simple training exercise, perfectly adequate.

Never tried pushing it further than that. RAM of course is a big deal, you need enough to cover the host OS and the concurrent machines you are going to run, and VM's eat hard disk space. I like to run VM's off a second hard disk for performance reasons, too.....

Virtual PC's approach to swapping data between real and virtual machine seems easier to me than VMWare's, but on the other hand VMWare supports USB, so use can be made of pen drives and the like.

Install is pretty straightforward, and with a minimal amount of reading you can be up and running.

"...can i use just 1 machine?" Ambiguous question - you can install VMWare on multiple machines, and can run multiple VM's on one host.

As to whether anyone would help you, there's plenty of stuff on the Internet if you run into trouble, and there's folk round here that use it too. . . . .

[20RickY06]

thanks for all the feedback...ill see what i can do once i get my comp upgraded...thanks...

[Ric_]

I use VMWare Workstation (paid for) to create VMs in work for the staff who then use VMWare Player. VMWare Server is very similar and will work on a standard OS - you just get a warning

I would ram (excuse the pun) as much memory as possible into your machine though as this is what gets hit the most.

Also check out the virtual appliances at vmware.com to show you some novel uses of VMs and help you get into different OSs without having to set them up too much.