A few weeks ago VMware released their free VMware Server Beta virtualization software which I downloaded and installed on my little Debian slave, an AMD Duron 1300 with 512MB RAM. This machine normally holds backups of my main computer and serves as a general purpose Linux box and webserver for me at home. Well, I had to learn that there is still much more that you can do with it.

Every now and then I wished to have more than one Linux box so that I could easily try something out and get rid of it afterwards without touching my default installation. And, yes, very seldom I’d like to have a Windows 98 environment to compile and test an older piece of software. But yet I was neither willing to provide a third computer for that nor to struggle with drive images or multi-boot setups.

And now these wishes become true at no cost with VMware Server. You see, I am excited. So I took the following screenshots to demonstrate how simple a new virtual machine can be brought to life. The shots are taken from VMware Server Console running on my Windows XP main machine to control the Debian slave with VMware Server.

You may complain about the one or another shot being redundant, but my intention is to also produce an authentic impression of this beautiful installation process that we all got to like that much over the years. Of course, the good old Windows 98 startup disk had been prepared and inserted into Debian slave’s disk drive ;-)

This entry was posted on Sonntag, März 26th, 2006 at 11:12 pm and is filed under Programmer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.