vmWare servers

i have mess with vmWare quite alot for a while in my cna ccna and mcp class we would set up vmware severs like netware 6.1 and it would run alittle slow but not to bad i was just wondering your thoughts here on VmWare anything

I use VMWare Workstation with XP Home to run RedHat 9. Overall, I really like it. Because of having Compaq's proprietary OS cd, partioning on this box wasn't an option, whatsoever, so it has allowed me to expand in a way that I couldn't before.

It does run a little slower than I'm used to, but it also allows me to try out different distros without having to go through the hassle of partioning and repartioning. It's as simple as deleting the guest OS from the main screen and it's done with. So for what it can achieve, the overall speed of it doesn't really concern me, but even that isn't that bad.

Although I have VMware, I have been using Connectix for a number of years, or as it's now known, Microsoft Virtual PC 2004. As stated by GreekGoddess, it is a hassle free way of installing a new distro of any o/s without the need for partitioning. At the moment, I have Win 2003 Server and Mandrake 9.2 installed as guest operating systems. To run server versions of either VMware or Microsoft as a guest, requires that a server o/s is installed on the host system. I find it a quick, convenient and inexpensive method to experiment with networking

I use Fedora and wun Win4Lin - which although doesn't provide all the functionality of VMWare, it is much 'lighter'

www.netraverse.com

Steve

While I agree with everyone's statements above regarding ease of tinkering with multiple OSes, there is a dark side to VMWare that many folks don't know about.

We have a bunch of clowns that tried to deploy VMWare in a production environment and ended up voiding a 100,000 dollar MS support contract. Many software vendors will not provide support if their products are installed within a VMWare environment. Symantec is certainly another one who holds this position.

Also, technically, it adds overhead to your box and at times I have seen the network bridging feature do unusual things. Things like writing the IP address of the host OS, instead of the address assigned to the virtual OS.

So boys and girls, keep those VMWare machines in your test labs only!

Here is what MS has to say about VMWare support.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;273508

Of course MS is going to say they don't support VMWare, they want to push their own virtual machine, I'm willing to bet they offer support for their operating systems running inside it.

As for VMWare, it's gorgeous. I use the software for my college program. They've actually modified all the program's so that instead of multiple partitions, they're all Windows boxes with virutal machines. It also means we don't need an actual lab and a ghost server to do our various classes, we can use any room and run VMs.

As for the speed issue, that can vary. I've ran VMs on everything from a P3 800 and up. on the P3, it would be slow at times but as long as you had enough RAM you were ok. The 800 had 512MB. For my program that min. req. is 512MB RAM and a 1.1GHz cpu. The rentals from the college have celeron processors and they can handle one VM no problem, and two VMs with a slight slow down. I use a Celeron 2.2Ghz w/ 512MB of RAM and have no problem running 2 and occasionally 3 VMs, as long as I'm not doing anything too intensive. This system I'm on right now is an AMD XP 2500+ w/ 768MB of DDR. I'm curring emerging some software on a gentoo VM. I have 4 consoles running, each compiling apps (everything from kde to php to apache to ethereal and so on). That is a pretty heavy burden in and of itself. When you add my background apps (ICQ, MSN, AIM, Skype, mIRC, AVG, etc...) it's doing it's fair deal of work. My roommate and I Just finished watching American Wedding (while the VM was running in the background) and it didn't hinder the movie at all, even though it's compiling four seperate programs.

The only thing to be careful of is VMWare 4. We've had many students who chose to go with VMWare 4 (The college supports and provides VMWare 3) and there have been issues with Virtual DHCP Servers running. They seem to forget they're supposed to broadcast to the virtual machines and start accepting DHCP requests that are bound for the server yet heard by the NIC of the host machine. This caused some major problems, around 30-40% of the college had difficulty getting online while these rogue machines were tracked down and finally located.


Peace,
HT