El Bruno

http://www.larkware.com/editorials/vmware.html

VMware is releasing the beta version of a new product, VMware Server, which is the successor to their existing VMware GSX Server product. VMware Server will be a free product for server virtualization. This is, frankly, a market-changing move, and one that I expect a lot of people will take advantage of. Server virtualization is a wonderful technology; with it you can take a single physical server and partition it into multiple virtual servers that don’t step on each other. For example, I’ve taken a single Dell 1850 dual-processor server and used VMware GSX to simultaneously run a Subversion server, a Cruise Control .NET server, a Windows Software Update Services server, a Data Protection Manager Server, and several more servers – without the hassles of worrying about whether any of that software will conflict or fight over ports. In addition to keeping the software separate, this also enables me to make much better use of server hardware by running it at a higher average load, which in turn means paying for less hardware.

VMware Server offers quite a nice list of features, including support for 64-bit operating systems in both host and guest, virtual SMP, and a remote management console. It will be available for download from http://www.vmware.com/download/VMwareServer (though that URL may not be active until Monday). With this coming out for free, I can’t see why anyone would bother buying Microsoft Virtual Server – or run servers on bare metal. If you’re juggling multiple servers in your own development setup, you really need to make time to investigate this one when it’s available.