Overwhelmed By VMware Choices
 

I am new to VMware & really just am a bit overwhelmed with all the available options. There seems to be so many available options of products and would like to know if someone could break down maybe two or three of the most commonly used products from VMware.

I basically am looking for something from VMware that I can load on a standalone Linux server to host several virtual hosts of Linux / Solaris / Windows. I just don't know if I would need VMware Server, VMware Workstation, or VMware ESXi.

Can someone tell me what would be the best fit for someone who just wants to take one massive server with sufficient hardware to host multiple virtual guests from a server perspective.

Use VMware Server... it's also free

If you want your guest systems to all be servers, then VMware server is what you want. ESX resides in your hardware as a supervisor instead of a normal operating system and this MIGHT be what you want...but VMware server runs as an application within your existing OS rather than replacing it as ESX would.

VMware Workstation is what I use, and I use it extensively. But, I deploy complete workstations within my virtual machines, with complete user interfaces. So I need the higher horsepower of Workstation.