More on VMWare

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There's a continuing opinion series in Network World magazine about the writer's experiences with VMWare. I thought some of you might be interested in More VMWare Intricacies by self styled "gearhead" Mark Gibbs.

 

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I've used Knoppix and so has Flex, we used it to repair his XP install.

I'm going to have to get a copy of VMware, but it will have to wait until i can get some extra memory

 

Same here.

 

I use it with 256MB of DDR PC-2700, it is a little slow but on a par with something like a VNC connection over a LAN its is quicker.

SimonV

 

Yeah, but how many and what type of virtual machines can do you run?

 

I can run the host machine and 2 virtual OK. Anymore then its

My letter to santa mas this year has RAM on it, so fingers crossed.

Si

 

For me, the idea would be to run a server and two or three hosts. I'd like to start out in a pure Windows environment but eventually, I'd like a mixed OS environment. Also, depending on how the writing career goes, having a variety of OSes on tap for screen shots and labs would come in pretty handy.

As I've learned, VMWare has a 1 Gig RAM celling. Having more RAM on board won't enable you to support any more virtual machines. Bummer of a limitation.

 

I thought of a funny VMWare question on my way to work. No matter how much you pump up your HDD capacity or RAM, you can only load so many virtual machines on one box. Question: Can you connect your virtual LAN created in VMWare to a real LAN? Also if you have two boxes both running virtual machines on VMWare and you've configured them to run on the same subnet number, can you connect them and make one LAN? If you have a server set up as a router as a virtual machine on one VMWare box, will it route between to separate virtual networks on two the two different boxes?

 

Yes to all of the above

 

That was easy. I was waiting for some complicated answer that would make my head spin. Thanks, Phil.

 

No probs The virtual machines will quite happily live on your existing "real" network, if you wanted they could sit and act as servers and none of your users would be any the wiser. They walk, talk and serve packets just like the real hardware.

 

Pat them on the back and they say: "Momma"

 

I was also wondering this while reading down through this Thread. I too have only 256 DDR RAM, but do fancy giving VMWare a go.

I'm sure this has been said many times already, but does each virtual machine need a set amunt of disk space ?

Thanks in advance - has been an intuitive thread for me.

 

I'm sure Phil will come back with the definative answer but I imagine that each virtual machine needs the same amount of space on the HDD that it would need as a "real" machine. I got a 120 Gig drive with that in mind (almost got a 200 Gig SATA drive but my wife would have killed me when she saw the bill).

 

I'm back

The beauty of vmware is that whatever sized disk you tell it to have it only uses the same physical space on your drive as the software you have installed on the virtual machine. So say you have a default virtual machine config which is a 4 Gb drive, you install W2k server, sp it and so on. The space taken up on the virtual disk for arguments sake will be around 1gb, so the space taken up on your real drive will only be around a 1gb, the virtual disk files will grow as you add more software to them up until you hit the virtual limit you set in the VM config, 4 Gb in our case. As another example you could set up a virtual machine with w2k server and 5 x 4gb disks to play with the w2k software raid configurations, you'll still only use the 1 Gb. marvellous

 

I've gotta get me one of those.

 

Fabulous, Phil - thanks for clearing that up

I knew the hard disks I got a hold of lately would come in useful

 

I've been wondering lately about trying to use the physical hard for the VM machine to directly use.
Though you get a pretty stark warning in VM when you choose this, so I bottled out of it.

I suppose if I did configure the max to 4GB and then I needed more, I could just add another virtual disk and span it, as long as it's a dynamic disk.
Or just set the max to a high value of say 20GB, then you'd be safe as houses.

I've not really looked into DHCP on VMWare, not read up on it.I mean, can I still practice DHCP through Windows 2000, or does it have to be through VMWare.Or is VMWare atop of 2000.Sorry, just asking, I will read up on this when I get to all that networking lark.

 

Flex, why not try it, break it, fix it, then let us know ?

You know 100% more about it than I do right now, so I'm all ears for opinions on this .....

 

Well, yeah I'll mess around with networking a little more, and then learn a bit more about things.

As for the physical disk issue, I not going to use my main system to see what goes wrong, even with a backup.
I've heard it can wipe your hard drive, your real physical hard drive that is.
Think I'll bottle out of that one.