VMware Server for free
p2p news / p2pnet: With news that Microsoft has released Virtual PC 2004 SP1 for Windows for free comes further news that VMware’s virtualization platform is also going for free.
Or as The Register wraps it, VMware has officially joined the great virtualization software giveaway. The company this week peeled the ‘beta’ label off VMware Server and put the fully cooked version of the product up for download.
VMware Server takes the place of GSX Server – once VMware’s lower-end server product. The company still sells the high-end ESX Server as part of its new VMware Infrastructure 3 suite, says the story, adding:
The free package occupies a complicated place in the virtualization landscape. Big companies will not run their production or even large-scale test systems on VMware Server. They’ll opt for ESX Server instead. By contrast, enterprise customers have picked up the free Xen virtualization product for production work. Microsoft’s free Virtual Server product is closer to VMware Server in performance than ESX Server or Xen.
On Virtual PC, it started out as a commercial product for Apple Macs that enabled users to run PC applications, says Ars Technica, going on, The company later released versions for Windows, OS/2, and Red Hat Linux. In 2003 Microsoft purchased the company and the product became known as Microsoft Virtual PC.
The story says Virtual PC uses existing CD-ROM drives as devices in the VM, “so it is easy to install a new operating system on a blank virtual hard drive by simply putting the CD in and waiting for it to autoboot. A Sound Blaster sound card and a generic network adapter are also provided as virtual devices. On my system, I had to set the network settings to Shared Networking (NAT) before Ubuntu would recognize and configure the network adapter. The virtual hard drive is auto-resizing, so it starts out as zero bytes and only grows as much as it needs to, although according to the Ubuntu install it was a 17.3 GB drive when empty. The Linux distro installed without incident, although it did take about three hours to complete the process.”
VMware Server, “installs on any existing server hardware and partitions a physical server into multiple virtual machines by abstracting processor, memory, storage and networking resources, giving you greater hardware utilization and flexibility,” promises the company.
Digg this.
Also See:
The Register – VMware rubber stamps ‘free’ Server product, July 14, 2006
Ars Technica – Free Virtual PC from Microsoft, July 12, 2006
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