1.7 VM tips

[Warren Young]

Reini Urban wrote:
> 
> Now I read that VMware Server is free. 

True.  We rely heavily on it here.  Most of our VMs are various Linux 
flavors, but we do have a Windows box or two in there as well.

It has a really neat feature in that you can run the server on a 
different box than the client, but see the VM's display just as if it 
were local.  This avoids the need for VNC, X, or RDP.  Linux being 
Linux, you only need this while setting up the VM, before its networking 
setup is complete.  For Windows, you might find yourself using it for 
everything.

It behaves just like a "workstation" type VM product (Parallels, VMWare 
Workstation, Virtual PC...) in that you get a PC in a window.  There's 
not much slowdown working remotely this way, no doubt because VMWare 
Tools installs a special VGA driver that gives it low-level access to 
the screen updates.

You don't even have to physically stick a CD or DVD into the server's 
drive most of the time: VMWare Server will boot from an ISO image.  This 
has the secondary advantage that reading an ISO from the local hard disk 
is faster than using a real optical disk.

A few days ago I did try using VMWare Server on my Windows XP machine, 
and it worked fine for the most part, but it broke network multicasting. 
  (All other networking functions were fine.)  But, because of the 
beauty of virtualization, I just freeze dried the VM image, scp'd it 
over to the Linux server, and started the VM right back up over there. 
After I uninstalled VMWare Server here, I was back in business.  Being 
able to just pause a machine and put it away until you need it again is 
very easy to get addicted to. :)

I also noticed that VMWare Server installs much faster on Linux.  I 
heard a different horror story about someone using VMWare Server on 
Windows the other day, and I suspect his troubles were due to cancelling 
out of the installer halfway through, because he thought it was hung.  I 
doubt it; it's just slow... :(  It runs fine once installed, but it's 
clearly not quite at home on a Windows box.

I've also used Virtual PC on this machine.  It works fine for running 
Windows, but I only used it because it comes with MSDN.  (Also useful 
for the OS disk ISOs.)  I think I tried a Linux install on it and found 
it quirky.  VMWare is just more mature in that way.