On September 23 VMware released a new version of the free edition of their virtualization product VMware Server, version 2.0 (build 116503).
I have used the old versions of VMware Server a lot when running web sites, developing and testing software and techniques so I was very keen on trying the installation of this new release. Since I run this site on a virtual Ubuntu Server, using Ubuntu Server as host, I wanted to install the new VMware Server on a freshly installed Ubuntu Server 8.04.
To install the old versions of VMware Server correctly a lot of extra packages were needed on the host machine, such as x-window-system-core and xspecs. I’m not sure what all these extra packages do, but I didn’t like the fact that they had names like x-this and x-that. The machine running VMware Server has the server edition of Ubuntu installed for the simple reason that it is a pretty old thing and therefore it felt good not to install any X Window system.
Downloading the VMware Server
To download this new version of VMware Server you have to register an account on the VMware web site. This registration is free so no harm done. The old versions could be downloaded without this registration, but to get a serial number registration was needed. Not a big difference nowadays…
The size of the Linux download has increased by a multiple of five, so version 2.0 is a bit more than 500 Mb to be downloaded. This is not a big deal though…
Installation procedure
The installation of VMware Server is straight forward if you are familiar with the basic Linux stuff, extracting files and running programs with root privileges.
I had a freshly installed machine running Ubuntu Server 8.04 and I only installed two extra packages like this:
> sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`
These packages are needed for some steps in the VMware Server installation using the make program.
To install VMware Server extract the .tar.gz file and run the vmware-installer script like this:
> tar xvf VMware-server-2.0.0-116503.i386.tar.gz
> cd vmware-server-distrib
> sudo ./vmware-install.pl
During the installation I changed nothing, except the administrator user at the end. The root account was pre-entered, but in Ubuntu there is no root account activated by default so I changed this to my own account.
First impression
First I was surprised by the fact that I couldn’t find any management console application and I couldn’t connect to the server using an old version of this tool. Therefore I was “stuck” with the web interface, running on port 8222 or 8333 (the SSL enabled thing). After a while I became familiar with this, since the console was installed as a plug-in for my Firefox. This is really nice!
After a while I got scared since I have tried other server software running the administration through a web interface with the default web site being messed up, unavailable or things like that. I tried to install apache2 web server on the VMware host machine and it worked perfectly side-by-side!!!
Take a look at the screen shot below, showing the web interface for the VMware Server administration.
Read more
Read more and register for the free download on http://www.vmware.com.
I feel that way often in person and sometimes on blogs — that the conversation is so established I would be interrupting. I know exactly what you mean about that.