More VMWare Server Review
Monday, 10 December 2007
I had written up a VMWare Server review for the beta release earlier. Given that VMWare Server 2.0 Beta is already available, here’s a rundown on the differences between VMWare Server 2.0 and VMWare Server 1.x.
- Web based management - this beats having to Remote Desktop to the host operating system to manage virtual machines.
- Virtual guest OS can access 8 Gb RAM - assuming that your host is a 64bit OS (otherwise you are stuck with only 4Gb addressable memory).
Here’s a screenshot of the web-based management interface on VMWare Server 2.0. It prompts you to install an ActiveX control in order to view the server console. There used to be an annotation feature in 1.x server, so that you can write comments against a virtual machine. This useful feature seemed to have been dropped in 2.0.
The performance of the viewer is not as good as Remote Desktop, although it’s comparable to VNC. There is a full screen option, but it needs more work before final release. It messes around with the resolution of my second monitor. The folks over at 4sysops don’t think too highly of the new VMWare web-based user-interface, and I’m afraid I too concur. It simply takes a little too much screen estate, especially with the frameset in the web pages, plus the space used by the browser chrome. I hope they fix that before the 2.0 release proper.
P2V assistant is now free
The physical machine to virtual machine converter is now free. It’s known as the VM Converter, and is available for download free. I haven’t had the need to use this yet, but I’ll look to using it when I migrate off the laptop I’m writing this post on.
Review of the Scripting Interfaces on VMWare Server
The virtual server now supports VIX API 1.2. The documentation for the VIX API is here. I’ll post more after having a play around with it. The API itself is quite useful, as it permits automation of processes running in the guest. The following function names give an indication how what you can do with the API:
No. 1 — December 18th, 2007 at 7:52 am
[...] Update: VMWare Server 2.0 review [...]
No. 2 — January 27th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Vmware Server 2.0 VERY disappointing.
Useless, ugly, slow, and complicated web interface. Not even a simple operation like adding a ISO or VMX is easy. You have to use something called “Datastore” and you get errors all the time.
If this is the best Vmware can do, I will continue to use 1.0.4 and then switch to Microsofts stuff.
No. 3 — June 30th, 2009 at 11:41 am
lolz vmware server 2 rocked! Idk what mattias was smoking. Datastores are the way to go. All you have to do is map the datastore to a raid array and your all set. You can even add the isos in the “datastore” by placing them in the vmware folder on that drive. Simple though not necessarily as fast as esxi, and also wonderfully free.