i am curious. i have installed both. they seem to be very similar however, i seen to be onl;y able to run "server" thru a web browser, whereas WS has the nice gui interface. is this the only difference or is there a way to use a gui for 'server' also?

i am basically trying to determine whether it is worth it to a client to pay the 190$ or if i can accomplish more or less the same thing with the free 'server' version.

any suggestions.

-Levi

If you have a piece of hardware try installing ESXi

It is a lite version of linux that is tuned to running vmware. It comes with a nice gui and tons of features!

Oh and its free!

Version 2 of the server dropped the stand-alone gui in favor of the web based interface. I know they are different, but the web interface allows you to do anything the old gui did. The advantage of the web interface is you can have Server running on a remote machine and connect using just a web browser. If you really absolutely have to have the stand-alone gui, drop back to version 1 of Server.

As far as differences go, there is probably a lot out on the net. My understanding is that Workstation is designed for developer use, so you can have multiple snapshots of a particular VM available. You can probably do something similar with Server, you'd just have to be a bit creative with VM naming. I've been using Server for a bit now and haven't run into any real limitations.

I've managed to get the vmware-console tool to connect to the local server and it functions just like the gui, no need for a browser and it runs off of localhost, so no open ports for it either. I had to grab the vmware-console from the older version of the server, but its just an archive with the executables inside.

thanks for all the tips and replies. One follow-up question. Where would i get the older version of 'server'? the one i have, i downloaded from their site quite a few months ago, so i am thinking that they may not have the older one up there any longer. i'll check when i return home this evening.

thanks again to all.

Levi

You can get the older version here. Looks like 1.09 is the "latest". You might want to do some digging to find out how supported version 1 is, I'm not sure that VMware are actively working on it.