VMware Server — Now Free

VMware Server is now completely free. Don’t be confused by the name; you can run VMWare Server on a workstation, too!

For those of you who are not familiar with it, VM stands for Virtual Machine. There are a few different flavors of the product, but my favorite is VMServer. After installing VMware on your computer, you can create virtual computers. Just a few clicks and you’ll have a machine that’s ready to go. The amount of hard drive space and memory the virtual machine will use is completely configurable. You can also use your own CD-Rom drives as CD-Rom drives on your virtual machine, or you can map them to ISO files. You can then load any OS on it you want. Here at work we have some powerhouse servers that are running 10 or so virtual servers on them; our end users cannot tell the difference at all.

Yesterday I installed VMWare Server on my desktop at work and then loaded the latest Ubuntu release onto it. To do that I downloaded the Ubuntu install CD in .ISO format, created a new virtual machine, mapped the cd-rom drive to the .ISO file (all point and click), booted off the .ISO image and installed Ubuntu. Pretty slick.

Virtual machines are contained within a directory on your workstation, so to back it up all you have to do is stop the machine and backup the folder. You can also easily move VM clients from machine to machine by simply dropping and dragging them. It’s definitely something fun to play with.

My workstation doesn’t have enough RAM to provide decent results, but I suppose with a beefy enough box one could load up a virtual DOS machine and/or Windows 95 for some old school game playing and/or legacy app usage.

Link: VMWare.com

2 comments to VMware Server — Now Free

  • We have hundreds of VMs at work. The only problem is the stupid System Engineers load 18 per server up, so you get really shitty performance.

    There are also some applications and databases that can really push them in disk IO, which is VMs weakest point IMHO. Essentially our laptops are faster than the VMs end up being once you get anything other than web hosting setup on them.

  • Pat Loisel

    What language are you speaking in? I can’t be sure, but it sounds like Greek to me! :-) Mom

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