VMWare Server - My initial reactions

At my office I have several headless machines.

2 Big File servers crammed with drives (Fedora 4 and Fedora 5)
1 Firewall (FreeBSD)
1 PBX (CentOs)
1 Windows (Windoze XP) - just in case we have to use it for something windows-ish. Note, I spent two solid days earlier in the week rebuilding the damn thing after some problems, so I was looking for an alternative.
1 Linux ‘testing’ machine. Has Ubuntu on it, and just is used to test out specific linux things.

The rest of our work machines are Macs. Now that we have Intel Macs the Windows machine isn’t really necessary, but we dont’ like to restrict the Windows use to one machine.

I downloaded VMWare Server onto one of our FileServers. Registered for the free serial numbers. Very nice. Free. Impressive

I then created a virtual server for Windows XP and Ubuntu under it. Wow… very cool. Just like the real thing. The virtual servers even used a ‘real’ ip address on the network through bridging. This means my firewall traffic shaping was able to ’slow down’ traffic to the windows machine and still able to ’speed up’ traffic to the PBX (ok, prioritize).

The problem - for me - is the lack of a VMWARE server console for Mac. My solution - is to used the web based interface for setup and to VNC into those machines if I really need to.

I’m trying to move my apps over. It will be nice if I can chop this down to 2 machines. Ideally one would be nice, it’s just that I have about 12 drives of information (8 in one machine, 4 in another). A massive machine that held all those drives would be good, but I guess it provides some sort of redundancy and backup doing it this way.

For me, this is a great way to go. The thing is… I like bootable systems.

pfSense - I could use MoonWall or IPTables or something. But pfSense I can boot into and set up with ease. It works well, and the traffic shaping works really well for voice over IP with surfing and BitTorrent.

Same with Trixbox. It’s a complete system. I don’t want to install asterisk and then FreePBX. I get the Trixbox .iso, boot up, and I am in business.

The nice thing is - my two main servers are fast machines. My firewall and PBX are slow machines… now they are part of the ‘main server’ they are fast.

VMWare (symbol:VMW) went up fast in their IPO… hitting $120, and then falling back down. I bought some options in this company. I’m absolutely convinced that this virtual server thing will be huge. But then the stock fell. Hmmm… My options are for $120 in April 2008. Will it come back up in time?

Try out the VMWare Server.

I look forwarding to getting rid of these other machines, the space they use up, the electricity they use up, and the time they consume.

I tried setting up the MythTV iso - didn’t work. On my current machines, I need more RAM. But I plan on replacing most of these machines with a nice Core2Duo and a fair bit of RAM.

When I do, all I will need to do is move over the VMWare files to the new machine. Now that is convenient!

Once there is a console for the Mac, I’ll be a happy guy.