The Tenuous Link

At work we are collaborating with some programmers at SynApps-Solutions. As part of the work we both need to install our software on a computer, and SynApps have the job of making the two products talk to each other.

Fast internet and virtual servers are taking some of the traveling out of the collaboration, which is good. SynApps use VMWare Virtual Server, and have set up a virtual hard disk (a very big file) with their software on it for me. I have downloaded the free VMWare Player to use with the disk image, and will install the Active Navigation Server software on it. When SynApps are done, then the image will be given to the customer, which will save a couple of hours of installation and configuration work.

The VMWare player is a virtual machine environment that can run a virtual hard disk created with VMWare tools (or with Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 or Virtual Server 2005). What I see when I start the application looks like I have a whole new PC running in a window on my desktop.

Quite useful, but the limitation with VMWare player is that I can't alter the configuration of the virtual machine at all, and VMWare make it hard to install a different operating system on the virtual hard disk. Very useful for free though.

I already have Microsoft Virtual PC 2004, so if I really wanted to I could use that to set up my new machine, and then use VMWare player to run it, and make use of the better hardware virtualisation (USB devices). But slightly confusingly, VMWare also offer another free product called VMWare Server, which does let you configure your own virtual machines.

The free VMWare server offering is probably a reaction to Microsoft deciding to license Virtual Server 2005 for free. Maybe Microsoft deciding to provide tools to host Linux as a guest operating system is a reaction to VMWare's longstanding support for this?

And also Microsoft offer royalty-free use of their virtual hard disk format, so VMWare offer the open virtual machine disk specification. I think VMWare have more to lose from the rapidly descending prices of this software, after all, Microsoft still demand valid licenses for the software that you run on the virtual machines, but that's not my problem.

My problem is that I've discovered all this free stuff at once, and I don't have time to play -- someone tell me which one virtualisation host that I want!

Interesting fact: Although Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 is only supported for Windows Server OSs, it runs fine on Windows XP Pro.

Interesting tool: Microsoft supply a Virtual Server Migration Toolkit which can move the entire installation from a real computer in to a virtual one. Again, officially only supported for server OSs, and I don't know what would happen if I tried to use it to clone, for instance, a Windows XP installation.

An opinion from another developer is that VMWare workstation is slightly better than Virtual C 2004.

I've got the urge to install Linux as a virtual machine. Last time I tried this (running Knoppix in Virtual PC 2004), the X window performance was very slow.

Microsoft now offer some software to improve that, but only for certain Linux distributions. Red Hat Enterprise Server is one of those, and I plan to install CentOS which is a no-cost variant of that. I have read that it will work fine.

Download the Virtual Machine Additions from Microsoft Connect. You need to register with them first.