Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

… and I must have been too busy at work; I saw the rumours last week, but I must have missed the coverage yesterday when the release actually happened. After some teething trouble with the download site (and an email to VMware about it), I’ve finally been able to snag a copy of both the Windows and Linux binaries to play with.

The Virtual Machine Center includes a number of virtual machines ready to download and use from other distributions. Wouldn’t it be great to see Gentoo in that list?

With both VMware Player and VMware Server (formerly VMware GSX Server) now available for free, I’m puzzling a bit over the future of VMware Workstation. If VMware Server can create virtual machines (ie it’s not crippled in any way), then I wonder why most people would choose to purchase Workstation?

I guess the jury is still out on whether it’s a smart move by VMware or not. Is it just a reaction to Xen (and does that mean that Xen maintains the initiative)? Is VMware (which is owned by EMC) conceeding smaller installations (where Xen must be hurting margins), and instead hoping that an engineering focus on the high-end ESX product will allow them to maintain a competitive advantage over Xen? (And this at a time when EMC is trying to tell everyone that it loves small business (Bye bye Dantz, I for one will morn your passing) One of the strengths of using VMware in the enterprise are the tools that will take a physical server and create a virtual copy of it. Many of our clients at work rely heavily on this; I’ve not come across anything like that for Xen to date.

It would be nice to get an ebuild for VMware Server into the tree; there’s been a request for such an ebuild for the older GSX Server product for some time now

Fun fun fun!