09 February 2009

VMWare server 2 - a small evaulation

I have run VMWare Server 1 for some time. It though that it was time for an upgrade and decided to try VMWare Server 2. I'm using Ubuntu 8.10 as the host operating system.

The install file was 500 Mb, a lot larger then version 1. But okay, space is cheep.

The install process successfully managed to compile the VMWare kernel modules for Ubuntu 8.10 (2.6.27-11). Previous versions could never compile the kernel modules because VMWare did not keep up to date with newer kernel versions. The solution for version 1 was always to find a path file (vmware-any-any for example). So a big plus for the installation with VMWare Server 2!

But now the problems began:
I logged in via the web GUI. The web GUI is okay, but a bit slow. To see each virtual machine desktop a local program must be downloaded. For me as a firefox user it went rather easy by installing a firefox plugin. I tried Google Chrome, and it did not work there.

Two of my virtual machines was reported as "corrupt". I don't know why, possible because I have hand edited the configuration files. But VMWare server 1 had no problem with these. It got no better error message, just corrupt. Thats bad. A line number would be better.

I created an administrator user to login as. I tried to create users for the other persons on my company. I managed to create ONE other user. But after that it was impossible to create any more users. It got an error message that didn't help me anymore.

The issue of not been able to create uses made me revert to VMWare Server 1. Although VMWare Server 2 has some nice features on the paper (more memory allocation and local folder sharing), I must say that so far VMWare Server 2 is an immature product. I would recommend waiting with an upgrade.

Of you could try to look for alternatives. For example Sun VirtualBox.

Finnaly a hint of how to install VMWare server 1.0.7 on Ubuntu 8.10: http://ubuntu.se/forum/showthread.php?t=1780

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