Review: VMWare Server

By Jack Wallen in Product Spotlight, June 30, 2009, 5:41 PM PST

VMWare Server is for any IT department needing to cut cost on server hardware and/or create a reliable sandbox testing environment that can mimic a live environment. VMWare Server also enables you to speed up deploy time by building a virtual machine once and deploying it many times.

Virtualization is on every IT administrators' mind these days. And if you haven't looked into it, you should. The benefits of virtualization are many: cost savings, ease of development and testing, training, and many more. VMWare is the leader in virtualization; their solutions work well, are well supported, and are proven. VMWare Server is an outstanding product that allows you to virtualize your server installations with ease.

Supported guest operating systems

Windows 7, Vista, XP, 2000, NT, Me, 98, 95, MS-DOS 6.22 or better
IBM OS/2 Warp
Mac OS X Server
Linux
Sun Java Desktop
SCO OpenServer
SCO UNIXWARE
FreeBSD
Netware Server
Solaris 10 x86
Additional information on VMWare Server

Who's it for?

What problem does it solve?

VMWare Server solves many problems. The solution that will appeal to most is that of cost savings. Instead of purchasing hardware for ever server needed, you can purchase one server and run multiple virtual machines on that one piece of hardware. Outside of cost savings, VMWare offers testing solutions, provisioning solutions, testing solutions, and much more.

Standout features

Simple installation: VMWare installs like a standard application.
Web-based management interface: Manage your VMWare installation via Web browser.
Large guest operating system support: Nearly every version of Windows and many Linux distributions are supported.
Supports two-processor SMP systems and enables single virtual machine to span multiple processors: Allows your virtual machines to take advantage of multi-processing.
Virtual state capture: Capture your virtual machine's state so if a problem arises you can roll back to a previous state.
Easy migration path to other VMWare products: All VMWare products are made so that upgrading to a different product is easy.

What's wrong?

The biggest problem with VMWare is that there are numerous free solutions available, which are very tempting when cutting costs is the primary purpose of a virtualization rollout. On top of that, if you are cutting costs by using VMWare Server, instead of multiple machines for multiple servers, the horsepower of the VMWare hardware better be powerful or each virtual machine will suffer.

Competitive products

Bottom line for business

If you are looking to simplify and cut costs on your server installations, or if you are looking for a means to make testing and rolling out installation easier, you cannot go wrong with VMWare Server. Not only is the technology easy to use, it has proven itself the industry leader in virtualization technology. The benefits of deploying VMWare Server are many, but more than anything else, the savings you will gain make VMWare Server a no-brainer.

User rating

Have you encountered VMWare Server? If so, what do you think? Rate the unit and compare the results to what other TechRepublic members think. Give your own personal review of VMWare Server in the TechRepublic Community Forums or let us know if you think we left anything out in our review above.

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How would you rate VMWare Server?

About Jack Wallen

Jack Wallen is an award-winning writer for Techrepublic and Linux.com. As an avid promoter/user of the Linux OS, Jack tries to convert as many users to open source as possible. His current favorite flavor of Linux is Bodhi Linux (a melding of Ubuntu ...

9 comments

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russellsanders

"The biggest problem with VMWare is that there are numerous free solutions available" Yes but this is an articlie titled: "Product Spotlight: VMWare Server" VMware server is free!!!

The 'G-Man.'

Dediacted a machine with a small hypervisor installed that can run the VM's.

Justin James

I've had VMWare Server inflicted on me over the last year. It is horrible, especially the new version and it's Web interface. Version 1 was not nearly as bad. I tried doing a VMWare Server install on a new server, and I spent 2 days trying to sort of various Apache/Tomcat issues. This was rediculous! For the usage scenario that VMWare Server addresses... the constantly running VM in an infrastructure/app server/etc. capacity, hypervisors are a much better choice. Performance, managability, tools, etc. are all geared towards the task much better than a supervisor, particularly the awful VMWare Server product. It is intentionally crippled (only one snapshot? PLEASE!) to drive people to the pay products, and is therefore only suited to the most rudimentary needs. Why *anyone* with a Windows 2008 Server would use VMWare Server over Hyper-V is beyond me. Hyper-V blows it out of the water. Not saying that Hyper-V is perfect, of course. I haven't used ESX, but I am sure that it is a fine product for comparable needs. But at the "free" price point, Hyper-V is much better than VMWare Server. And for only a few hundred dollars, VMWare Workstation is an excellent product, particularly for testing and development usage scenarios. J.Ja

The 'G-Man.'

Hyper-V is not as you need to buy Server 2008 in order to get it.

The 'G-Man.'

jakesty

Although I like the VMWARE platform, HyperV from M$ isn't too bad. I use HyperV at work on a 2008 system and tend to think it's a waste. It should have been installed stand-a-lone for us. To make matters worse, backing up a 2008 server with HyperV has several limitations, and purchasing a copy of Backup Exec is very expensive. $500 or so for the BE, and almost $3000 for the client license of HyperV. I have installed the VMWARE Server version 1 over XP for several years and like it. When I tried version 2, I had nothing but problems like you did and reverted back. I've also installed ESXi and it's not that bad to work with either. You just have to learn the new technology. Can't say I know what the backup routine would be for it though. Nothings cheap that's for sure.