As you probably know, Virtual Server Software is making a huge splash. Anyone who has seen a Virtual Machine POST knew that was going to happen, that magic moment happened for me several years ago when I saw, I think, VMWARE 3.1 Workstation POST and I was seriously blurted out “Holy shit!” in the middle of an office with a bunch of others around. It was actually startling for some reason to see the POST.
Anyway, at this point Virtualization is becoming a commodity and everyone is giving it away. This is great because this virtualization is amazingly useful for many things and especially security. I *always* websurf to unknown sites with a virtual machine that is configured with undo disks and when I am done I simply shut the machine off and tell it to undo anything that was done. None of the IDs in the virtual are in sync with anything else I have and I run as a normal user so there is really very little opportunity for anything to ever really happen. Good stuff. On top of that I have actually started running my normal desktop that I do email and newsgroup postings, etc from in a virtual. That way I can move it around as needed or undo as needed. I have a nice backup of the file with the machine configured like I like and if anything seriously bad happens, I should be able to get back to where I was relatively quickly. So my main email desktop machine actually runs as a virtual on one of my “server” machines.
So enough with all of that, I mostly just meant to post that VMWARE has finally released its new production VMWARE server and as I mentioned above, they are giving it away. You can get it at the following link
http://www.vmware.com/download/server/
And so no one can say I am playing favorites, you can get the latest version of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 (that is a mouthful isn’t it, how about MVS 2.0 you marketing boneheads) at this link
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/software/default.mspx
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I just downloaded MVS 2.0 last week and it is much easier to setup a cluster using MVS vs. vmworkstation. I haven’t tried on vmserver but that is definitely a future project.
Isn’t Microsoft forcing VMWare to give their products away for free just to compete now? Maybe VMWare wants to hook us on these so that we pick ESX server when we want to run virtualization in production. Either way it’s really great for consumers.
Actually I think VMWARE might have struck first with the new version of vmware server being free. It was just released as a production product but it has been beta for some time and the whole time they indicated it would be a free product. So actually I think it might have been vmware that forced Microsoft’s hand.