PeterThe free of charge VMware Server makes a great virtualisation solution. What's even better is that the server version runs on Linux. Just a quick note - VMware Server is not an open source product, unlike other Linux virtualisation solutions like Xen, OpenVZ, qemu and others.
You do need to register with VMware before they will give you a key to the free version, but once you have, it's pretty easy to get started.
In this tutorial, I'm going to be installing on CentOS 5, but the instructions here should work for most distributions.
Quick note - for CentOS 5, I had to install the following packages with yum before the install would work:
- xinetd
- gcc
- kernel-devel (or kernel-xen-devel if you're using the Xen kernel)
Once it's downladed, extract it (I'm working on a machine without a GUI, so I'll be doing it command line style):
$ tar xzvf VMware-server-1.0.2-39867.tar.gz
Your version number may differ slightly. Once that's extracted, go into the directory it has created:
$ cd vmware-server-distrib
Now it's time to run the install script. This needs root privileges, so either use su -c or sudo, depending on your distribution. Here I'll use the former (and will continue to do so through the rest of this tutorial).
$ su -c "./vmware-install.pl"
You'll now enter the interactive install program. I usually accept most of the defaults here, as this installs everything into the default locations and makes it nice and easy to do.
Once you've done that through, you'll get this message:
Before running VMware Server for the first time, you need to configure it by
invoking the following command: "/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl". Do you want this
program to invoke the command for you now? [yes]
Just hit enter here and we'll be in the final stage of setup. You'll have to read and agree to the licence agreement first, so press Enter, get reading then press q once you've read it all. Type yes when prompted and hit Enter.
Now the configuration script will go away and do a little configuring. Continue to accept the defaults for mimetype icons, application desktop menu entries and the application icon.
At this point, if you're lucky, VMware should find a kernel module and load it in. If not, you'll get this message:
None of the pre-built vmmon modules for VMware Server is suitable for your
running kernel. Do you want this program to try to build the vmmon module for
your system (you need to have a C compiler installed on your system)? [yes]
Make sure you have the gcc and kernel-devel packages insalled on your system (if not, use yum to install them and restart vmware-config.pl). Press Enter.
VMware will go off and build a kernel module. If all goes well, you should move on to a question about networking. It's wise to choose yes for all of these, so you can use all the different network types for your virtual machines. Unless you know you don't need something, configure it anyway.
Once you've set up networking, the configuration tool will go off and compile some more stuff.
After that, you'll be asked which folder you want to store your virtual machines. This is completely up to you, but make sure you have enough disk space!
Finally, you'll be asked for your key that you got off the registration page earlier. Paste this in and finish the configuration.
You can now launch the VMware Server Console (or use the VMware Server client to connect to your new server from another machine). Enjoy!
