VMWare is a company that developes proprietary virtualization software. They've been around since 1998 and are now the industry leader in virtualization software and appliances. Their most notable products are VMWare Workstation, GSX and ESX Server. These products aren't free but a little over a year ago they launched VMWare Server GA(General Availability) which is based on GSX Server and is free to use. I've been using it since the beta version and I must say I'm very happy with it so far. Some of you whom may have already had experience with the three non-free products might miss some features like linked cloning and shared directories between guest and hosts but it still has allot of features, its easy to use, stable and free of charge. Now I do allot testing and evaluating new software, especially client-server and network centric software. Server GA has made it so much easier for me. Its probably the best learning tool I've used to date. This blog actually runs on an Ubuntu Guest within Server GA on top of an Ubuntu Host with 2GB RAM and P4 processor. The performance isn't bad and I usually have about 3 or 4 other Guest running at the same time on this host.
Anyway enough of the VMWare overview. Download it and try it for yourself. It runs on Windows and Linux although benchmarks have shown that performance wise it runs best on Linux hosts.
There are two things I do with Server GA on a regular basis and they are creating snapshots and cloning. Snapshots are good when making a change to some software on your Guest that you might be unsure of. You can just take a snapshot of the Guest prior to the change and if everything goes haywire after the change just revert back. Its one of those features that once you use you won't know how you made major changes without it. Now unfortunately cloning a VM isn't a built out feature in Server GA..meaning you can't do it within the GUI and there's no command line utility that allows you to easily clone a VM. There is a command line utility packaged with Server GA called vmware-vdiskmanager that allows you to change the name of a virtual disk. This utility is what I've used along with a few other shell commands to fully clone a VM.
VM cloning is cool because allot of times I want to bring up an OS quickly to test some software that might need to run in its own isolated environment so what I do is keep a base pristine installation of Linux(Ubuntu Server mainly) and Windows Guests and then I run some commands to clone base install. After the process I can start the newly created VM and wallah I have a freshly installed system within 10 minutes. Anyway I wrote a
script that will do this for. If you can't put the script to use for yourself you can at least read it to get an idea of how to clone in Server GA since its not apparent.
Of course when you're done cloning you'll need to Create a UUID after you start the VM and go through routine things within the OS like changing your hostname, IP and applying new updates.
Clyde