On Fri, Sep 08, 2006 at 10:44:29AM +0100, Mark Rogers wrote:
However, so many distro developers will have made use of VMWare in the past that the vast majority ship with drivers for VM.
Yes, that's what I assumed it meant in this context, slightly different from the situation with VM Server where the installation actually interacts with the OS it's being installed on.
Not sure what you mean here.
Both server and workstation (and player) are applications which sit on top of a "host" O/S, and they'll only run if that O/S works as a host. The range of choices here is wide but not exhaustive.
Yes, so they *do* make assumptions about the layout of (for example) the rc files on a Linux box and, to install slackware, one needs to do a bit of creative moving/modificaition of the rc scripts.
Once running all products emulate a complete PC. That PC is "built" from a fairly narrow set of (virtual) hardware, although which bits you select (and how many of them) is up to you. That PC is a standard x86 and will support any x86-based O/S that has drivers for its set of hardware. Here the range of options is much wider.
That's how I understand it, but the Vmware site still says it only supports SysV based Linux variants as virtual systems. From what you're saying (and as I understand it) this is not like for the Server/Player installation which simply won't work on Slackware without some help. Installing Slackware on a Vmware virtual machine will probably work without any mucking about, it's just "not supported".
Presumably there must be *some* correlation between the emulated hardware and the host PC hardware. I.e. you can't emulate an NIC unless the underlying hardware actually has a network connection of some sort (or at least the emulated NIC won't work unless you have an actual network connection).
Yes and no.
You can run a virtual network between your host PC and your virtual PC(s) without having a real network card. Your (host) PC will have its own IP address on the VMWare virtual network interface, and each VM will also have their own IP addresses, and you can talk between them. If you have a real network then you have more options (like the virtual machines bridged to the real network so other PCs on your LAN can access them as if they were real PCs).
You can similarly have a CD/DVD drive in the virtual machine mapped to your physical drive, but you can also map it to an ISO (very useful for VM installs) so you don't actually need a physical drive. The same applies to floppy disk drives.
You would really benefit from downloading the 30-day trial of the workstation product and getting your head around these things - it's much clearer with one in front of you than "in theory". Then try server and see how it compares.
Yes, that sounds a good idea, I'll do that tonight (though the hardware may creak a little, espcially re: memory).
Ah, OK, so it's an 'X like' thing. (With a major difference being that the 'server' and 'client' are reversed when compared with X !!)
"Like", but not "the same as". Not sure why you say the client/server are reversed though: when I run console on my desktop it acts as a window into the virtual machine running on the server. The virtual machine always runs on the server.
Remember with X the *server* is the machine you have in front of you with the display on it, the *client* is the (probably) remote machine that is actually running the program you are using.
Thanks again for all the very useful help from various sources, I'll now go away for a while and probably try Vmware Workstation. Wait for the wails when it all goes wrong! :-)