VMed
by Volker Weber
I have finally gotten around to install my complimentary copy of VMware Workstation 5. I nuked Scooter, made a fresh XP install — that takes hours to update to the latest patch level — and installed VMware on top of it. Created a Windows 2000 Prof VM — again hours of updates — then made a clone of it and installed all my accounting software into this VM. After restoring all data into the VM I was ready to reinstall Kermit which used to do all my accounting. It is only fired up once a month and has not been reinstalled for four years. Hey, it's only been used a few dozen times since I got Lucy. ;-)
Today I nuked Kermit and made another fresh XP installation with VMware, moved over the VMs I created yesterday and put Scooter back into the lab. Now I have a clean Windows installation, a clean accounting VM and a clean Windows 2000 Professional image which I can use for software tests. I think I will also create a VM of my Windows XP so I can use that as a template for tests as well. Just for kicks I just created an Ubuntu VM. Make sure you have gcc and the kernel headers installed before installing the VMware tools.
I have a whole bunch of software packages sitting around here, for instance a Windows 2003 server or an Exchange server. In the future they will go into VMs. VMware must be the best invention since ... whatever. :-)
Comments
... the wheel? ;-)
sliced bread. :)
Did you ever look into Vitual PC -- awailable for Win32 and also Mac OS :-)
You used the instructions here to load VMWare tools in Ubuntu, didn't you? ;-)
(ducks and runs away very fast)
Chris, no, I didn't. I fired up the install script and when it asked for the compiler, I started Synaptics and had it install from the internet, then when it asked for kernel headers, I did that too. Both took only a few seconds each.
Your post seems to complain, that you had to install those two packages. I actually can't blame Ubuntu for not providing for this scenario. Ubuntu in a VMware machine is hardly mainstream. And as for VWware, well, they already support quite a few Linux distros.
Daniel, I only looked at the Mac version, and was not really happy with it. For running guest a OS other than Windows, I'd also rather not rely on Microsoft.
I was joking Volker. You (rightly) took me to task for that post at the time if you remember.
Now I remember. :-)
I agree, love VMware. Wait until you start creating Teams, and then simulating poor network connections between the team computers, simply fantastic stuff.
I put in a proposal for a Lotusphere sessions on how VMware can be used to test your Domino applications etc.
We'll see if it gets any attention, I'd ratehr they had more sessions on Sametime than a VMWare session though.
I tried Virtual PC, it didn't perform as well as VMWare, took longer to boot up and create it's network connections and also couldn't use virtual memory inplace of real memory, so you couldn't load as many Virtual Sessions.
