cl@isbd.net wrote:
Is anyone here using Vmware?
Yes: vmware-server and (separately) vmware (full, not player) on Ubuntu.
Does anyone here have any experience of doing this? In particular how good is the hardware support for Win2k in VMware, I want to be able to use a scanner from Win2k in particular.
If the hardware is USB or parallel port based (as I assume your scanner is) then it ought to work just fine on VMware player at least. Basically, assuming you have it set up right anything you plug in to USB while VMWare has focus will get passed seamlessly to the virtual machine. Not sure how that would work with the server version but it wouldn't make sense for you to use it anyway. As far as I know player would work the same, except that it's not quite so easy to create a new VM using it (but not impossible).
Things to be aware of if you're not used to the VMWare approach is that everything that your Win2k install will see is the VMWare virtual hardware, not the real hardware. So amongst other things, even with a really good graphics card your VM will be limited to standard 2D stuff (no DirectX support, or at least none that's worth writing about).
Since you're looking at new hardware anyway, I would at least make sure that it will run Xen properly and allow full virtualisation that way; its probably too early just yet to actually use Xen for a Windows install but that may be a better long term goal.