I am seeking answers for what I hope are two simple questions about VMware.

I have a reasonable knowledge of Linux -- Ubuntu and Red Hat -- but know virtually nothing about VMware other than it supports virtual machines (systems) on one piece of hardware.

1) After installing VMware and before installing any virtual machines, what is the interface to VMware, so you can install a new virtual machine, configure VMware, or something like that? Is it a GUI or a shell, and is the interface just plain old obvious?

2) Does having a reasonable knowledge help you with VMware?

tnx
cmn

Hi there,

Well the interface will be GUI and you will be able to create, configure and manage virtual machine using it. Refer this document: http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/d...ple_steps.html

It will look more or less similar to the screenshot shown in the above link.

Yes, that will work infact you will find it quite interesting :-)

The steps that you need to perform to install VMware on Linux are:

1. Get the VMware workstation or server package for your machine (it depends on the OS you are using)
2. Install VMware using rpm or deb (again depends on the OS in use)
3. Then run vmware-config.pl (You have to make sure that you have c header files for your kernel and gcc already install to compile vmon modules)
4. Run VMware :-)

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Nope, it is a licensing issue. While you have to pay for the workstation version the server version is free. You can without any problems run the server version on a workstation or laptop, and you can run also the workstation version run on a server (with GUI installed).

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One last question. I thought VMware (server) owned the whole "box" (hardware) and that VMware itself was the OS and not installed on top of another OS. What am I missing here? Thanks.

The server version runs on top of an OS, like the workstation version, What you mean is the VMware vSphere Hypervisor, this version doesn't use an OS to run on, but directly interfaces with the hardware.

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Hi TobiSGD,

Are you talking about VMware ESXi?

Well wasn't aware about that, thank you. The differences that I thought to be between VMware server and the workstation is that VMware server (apart from running on workstation) intended to run on servers. Also to provide features which are more required by a servers as compared to workstations.

Edit: Sorry forgot to mention that VMWare server include VMware player to remotely manage VMs. Not sure if this feature is there in VMware workstation but I have seen this in VMware server.

Yes, I am: http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphe.../overview.html

I totally recommend ESXi 4.1 instead of VMWare server.
ESXi is a thin virtualization layer, as opposed to having a base OS first, such as Redhat/Fedora/Windows, then running VMWare server on top of it. ESXi is much leaner, leaving hardware resources for your virtual machines(VMs)
We have over 200 Linux and Windows VMs in production with ESXi.