explain VMWare

*i am not sure if this is the right section, please move if not*

i didn't want to hijack this thread were my actual question came up.

my actual question:
isn't that essentially what vmware is supposed to do?

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Neur0mancer said:

No VMware lets you run guest operating systems on your computer.

I IE you boot up windows and than open a window that loads linux. So you can run multiple OSes at one time. Requires a lot more HW performance than a netbook will give you.

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i thought that via vm client you could access a vm that runs on a vm server, utilizing most of it's ressources instead of the local machine. in essence what x-window has been doing for decades.

i am no gene when it comes to vm but would like to learn more about it. i just installed server 2008 w/hyper-v and have been playing with that but have very little time. i also played with MS virtual pc. i heard that esx or esxi is the best and virtualbox is the best really free alternative to it.

I am currently using VM Ware Workstation on my system to run Linux and Windows 7 from within my current Vista install.

The VM's (Virtual Machines) take one or two cores from my quad and you can allocate a portion of your ram to the machine. This is the only version of VM that I have used, so I don't know if there is a server vesion that allows you to run a VM remotely and use the server's resources for your VM clients.

Hope that helps some!

ok cool, anybody here used esx before? the full server/ client version?

Apart frm the fact that ESX is really expensive, you don't want to run it on your hardware. It will not run ontop of your current OS but replace it fully. It's only usable for real enterprise servers. For your needs, get VMWare server: there's a free version for you to download from vmware.com and you can access it remotely as you wanted. Tho, Virtualbox is remotely accessible too with a RDP client.

so the vmware server is accessible remotely. also via rdp or via client

BoT said:

so the vmware server is accessible remotely. also via rdp or via client

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Proprietary browser plugin only, last time I used it.

pharoer said:

Apart frm the fact that ESX is really expensive, you don't want to run it on your hardware. It will not run ontop of your current OS but replace it fully. It's only usable for real enterprise servers. For your needs, get VMWare server: there's a free version for you to download from vmware.com and you can access it remotely as you wanted. Tho, Virtualbox is remotely accessible too with a RDP client.

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ESXi is free and can be run on plenty of non-enterprise systems. That list grows daily.

It does require some workarounds in some cases, but that should not be too much of an issue for anyone already at this forum. I had it up and running on an old Dell Precision 340 in 30 minutes (not practical, but it was a test).

It is a bare metal install, as mentioned though, so it won't be of any use if you want to keep Windows as a host OS.

ok, so taken i don't want windows as a host, which is not really needed because it could run in the vm. this would actually be better because as i hear esx would basically run at command line and therefore leave just about all resources for vm's
jon, did you have any more time to play around with it?

BoT said:

jon, did you have any more time to play around with it?

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I manage a small ESXi farm at work, so yes. This is on systems it has been designed for though.

Either way, once it installs and sees your disk subsystem, ESXi is ESXi regardless of the system it's installed on