VMWare

[ZoneseeK]

Anyone here have any VMWare experiance? I have personally never touched it, or ever had to, as my company's sister company are VMWare/Citrix specialists so whenever we run into any vmware or citrix in an environment, they do the work....but VMWare interests me and I want to try dicking around with it.

I grabbed an old server that was being tossed thats pretty good, better then what zoneseek.ca runs on currently. It's got 8gigs of ram and twin xeon processors. I want to use VMWare to run both my windows domain and my linux server on the one box to save a bit on the electrical bill.

So if anyone knows vmware tell me what its all about, how do i use it to do the above. I see that vmware server is a free download, also seen a million vmware workstation rips fly by the 0day lists over teh last few months, but i notice theres vmware server for windows. Do I have to install windows server, then isntall vmware for windows and install my linux server on THAT virtual machine? Kind of like the same thing I would do with MS Virtual PC, which I am familiar with? For some reason I always thought vmware worked as its own O/S which then virtually booted x-amount of other O/S's simultaneously and then had some sort of keypress used to flip between the two, much like a KVM on a single machine. Am I wrong about this? Do I have to run one O/S, then install VMWARE server, then install teh second O/S within that first one?

Hopefully one of you dickheads knows this shit. thx in advance :D

[Micky]

http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

You mean this?

I don't know never used one but as I understand it, it can act like a sandbox where you can install software into it without risk of virus and shit. Or run a linux OS within windows without having to install it on another partition, theres an option for doing that on the ubuntu install disk, I did not try it though. I'm pretty sure wine which you use to run windows applications within linux is like a virtual machine, which I got to download later.

[Avoch]

Lil T has it the best really.

What you do is install VMWare Player on a PC for example, then have it run VMs for whatever OS. It basically emulates whatever OS you are running as a VM on it, I use it to run openSUSE when I need to access a Mac hard drive or something like that. I am sure you can use it as a more full time option as it has access to all the resources your PC does, and you'd basically be running it as an OS inside another OS.

[ZoneseeK]

yeah so it is kind of like a boot loader that then runs multiple virtual os i never noticed the 'player' part. well theres my project for the next few months

thx

[hinch]

if your into that idea of thinking look at hyper-v whilst i've never played with vmware i've got a machine here running hyper-v sessions of server 2k8 enterprise and 2 different linux distro's

[ZoneseeK]

Nice hyper-v never even heard of it, being a m$ product i think ill try this before vmware as I will probably eventually need to know it anyway.

[hinch]

hyper-v is fairly new so its not without its bugs but the versions attached with the latest server 2k8 are the dogs bollocks