VMWare Server: Web-based admin for virtual servers and their hosts
A few years ago, VMWare released VMWare Server at no charge to customers. VMWare Server v. 1 had demanding requirements to run on Windows. You needed a Windows Server machine configured with IIS and ASP.NET. You no longer need Windows Server, nor do you need IIS. You can run Server 2 on any NT based system including all versions of XP.
VMWare Server is certainly nothing new, but I’ve only recently started dabbling in the world of virtualization. There are two types of server virtualization systems. One is hypervisor based and runs as its own operating system. The other is software based and runs on top of another operating system. VMWare Server is the latter type. It can run on any NT based Windows system or any recent Linux kernel. There are several differences. Hypervisor based systems generally run better. They’re more efficient and use less resources to run the VM software. However, software based systems have their advantages. You don’t need to dedicate a server to run your VMs on; you can run them on any Windows or Linux based systems.
Server virtualization systems are not like desktop virtualization systems. They are optimized for services that are mission critical and that need to run whenever the system is on. Desktop virtualization systems, such as Parallels or VMWare Workstation, generally don’t have options to start the VM when the system starts, whereas the server virtualization systems.
VMWare server provides a web based interface to manage the VMs. There is no need to install a client (except an Active-X plugin or Firefox extension for remote console). I personally liked this. When compared with VMWare’s hypervisor based solution ESX, this for me, is a huge advantage. I like being able to control the virtual servers from wherever I am without needing to install client software. For me, neither is a huge deal since I have my laptop everywhere, but the convenience is still nice.
All in all, I really like VMWare Server as a virtualization solution for consolidating servers. Check back later for an article on ESX 3i