February 29, 2008
Installing VMware Server 2.0 on Debian
Posted by: admin : Category: VMware
It’s been a while since this post was accidentally deleted due to some very bad circumstances.
I must admit, that there was no current backup for this post, so a restoration was not possible.
Basically this topic was just a follow-up to a previous post updated for VMware Server 2.0 on Debian.
In the meantime, VMware has released ESXi vor free as well, so using VMware Server maybe superseeded by choosing ESXi.
As a sidenode also consider the post at the Ubuntu forums. There’s a short howto and a script available, which eases installation procedures. Supposedly, this could be easily adapted for Debian, as both Distros share very common roots.
April 14th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Ahem,
VMware Server 2.0 is a big step backwards for me at least (and a lot of other people):
– the vmware-console has gone
– no native linux-client anymore (only VI-client, which is slow even on Windoze)
– still no native Mac-Client (or course)
– the tomcat-server and all the stuff around the webinterface consumes more memory now
We’ll see how the post-beta performs (and VMware haven’t totally ruled out a Linux or Mac VI-Client) – but it’s still a bad situation.
I’ll wait for pricing info on the parallels server (which has a GUI for Linux+Mac+Win)….
Yeah, it’s a free product – but I’d happily pay something for it – I already pay for Workstation anyway – if it didn’t go the route it’s currently headed.
April 20th, 2008 at 6:50 am
How’s it going so far with the Beta version 2.0?
April 27th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
The absence of the VMware console may be a negative point, at least as long as the new VI interface performance is as slow and sluggisch as seen in the beta.
As I wrote in the article, it runs at reasonable speeds on my Windows box with IE only, while it is far from usable on the linux box with FF.
Even on FF on Windows it is rather slow, but still usable.
Also during my further tests I came along the situation, where the tomcat server produced around 200 % cpu load. This dropped after I restarted the VI service, however the phenomenon reappeared after some time using the VI web interface.
That’s certainly a big negative aspect, as virtually no cpu time was left to actual virtual machine.
In terms of performance between VMware Server 1.0 und 2.0 beta I didn’t see any particular difference in processing / emulation speeds (given that all debugging in the beta is turned off).
Test using FreeBSD and Linux where ok, also with Windows Server 2003. Using Server 2008 I encountered spontaneous reboots of the host multiple times. This happened also on another machine. If this is either an issue of the hardware in use or a bug present in the beta code, is not yet known to me.