Author name: chipx86

Wow, what a ride. We just put out this morning (or late last night, depending on time zone) beta 1 of our new VMware Server product. Now you know why I’ve been saying “I’m really busy, can we discuss this later?”

Yes, this is the one that you may have heard rumors about on CNET, Slashdot, etc., but those sites didn’t all have the facts right.

What VMware Server Is:

• Free virtualization for servers.
• A way to give people free virtualization with the hope that they’ll consider eventually moving up to ESX for the enterprise.
• Based on VMware GSX.
• The successor to GSX.
• Capable of 64-bit guests, Virtual SMP, new guests like Ubuntu, auto-detect devices, etc.
• Capable of opening Workstation 5.5 VMs.
• Available for Linux and Windows hosts. It should be the same set that Workstation 5.5 works on.
• Ported to GTK2 (using a slightly more evolved Workstation 5.5-based UI).
• Beta!

What VMware Server Is Not:

• A stripped down or crippled version of VMware GSX. Server has even more capabilities than GSX did.
• A replacement for Workstation. VMware Server has no support for multiple snapshots or team functionality, and while Server is a server product, Workstation is a good desktop and development product.
• A replacement for Player. Player is still high on our priority list, and we useful for the average person who just wants to run VMs.
• A response to an apparent Xen or QEMU threat. While Xen has potential, it’s primarily just a hypervisor, and we’ve had one of those for ages. The interesting work is built on top of that (as XenSource, another proprietary software company, is doing).
• A sign that VMware is doomed. I’ve heard this one a lot, and it just makes me chuckle. This should be taken as a sign that we’re doing pretty good. How many companies have the insight and abilities to give away their products for free and still make money?
• A dead product before it begins. I don’t think there’s a worry about that. We’ve put a lot of effort into it so far, and are already hard at work on beta 2.
• A money sink for us. We’ll be making money through optional support contracts.

I’m especially proud of this product. I’ve invested a lot of time into it, and so has everybody else involved. I’d like to thank everybody who has had to put up with me telling them I’m too busy for this or that lately 🙂 We’ll be working hard on getting this to a mature 1.0 state.

As of yesterday, we’ve released the final version of VMware Player 1.0. Up to now, VMware Player has been in beta, so if you’ve been using it, it’s time to upgrade.

For those who haven’t heard of VMware Player, I’ll give some details. The Player is a program for Windows and Linux used to run existing virtual machines. If you have a VM created with Workstation or through a third party VM creator program, you can run it in the Player. It won’t be slower than in Workstation, it won’t have a time limit, and it won’t nag at you to purchase a product. It’s a free program so that people can see the power of VMs and make use of them in their day-to-day activities. If you decide later to buy a more powerful VMware product to take advantage of VM creation, snapshotting, teams, etc, that’s entirely your choice 🙂

There is a FAQ discussing several questions such as redistribution rights of the player.

We’re now starting to link to interesting virtual machines built by the community. Want to try Fedora Core 4? Download a VM and the Player and start using it without setting up a new partition and rebooting. There’s AstLinux, an open source PBX. The links on the left of the page will take you to VMs created by other companies. These include the Ubuntu Breezy VM, SuSE and Novell Linux Desktop, amongst many others.

There is also our Browser Appliance VM, which is designed to provide basically a jail for web browsing, instant messaging, and e-mail. Useful to give to your kids so that they won’t mess up your computer 🙂 We’ve had this for a while, but it’s recently been updated, and we now even provide a bittorrent of the VM.

A search for “VMware Player” provides over 2 million results. There’s a number of good links that show up, including VMs provided by others and third party tools.

About a year ago, I had plans to purchase a computer for my little sister so that she’d have a desktop of games that she could use without having to touch the family computers. Instead, I’m going to less expensive route and will be building a VM of games like Tux Paint. I can now put the VM on the computer and install VMware Player, and she’ll be set. Or maybe stick them on a 1GB memory stick so that she can play her games anywhere she goes… once I’m confident she won’t lose it 😉