VM Ware Server 2.0 Experience

I have been doing a lot of virtualization in the past 2 months or so. The engine of choice so far is VM Ware. Microsoft also has a virtualization engine called Virtual PC - I have never used it, but a lot of people that I know use VM Ware, so basically I just follow suit. Maybe when I have a chance to play around with Virtual PC, I will write a blog post comparing them against each other.

What I want to highlight in this post is some of the tips and tricks that got mine to work as I needed. Your needs may differ, but hopefully some of these are generic enough that they can still be helpful.

VM Ware Server site: http://www.vmware.com/products/server/

When you click download, you will need to fill in a form to get your key. It is free, so go ahead and fill in the form and the instruction to get the key will be emailed to you. Once you get the downloaded file, run it to execute the installation procedure.

Installation is pretty straight forward - just follow the instruction provided by the installer. At some point, you will be required to enter a license key - this is the key you got from the registration process.

Once the installation is done, usually it will create a shortcut on your desktop called "VMWare Server Home Page". This is the main executable that will launch the interface for VMWare Infrastructure interface. When you run it (by double clicking it), it will open a browser (whatever browser set to be the default) and there are 3 things that you will typically see.

1. There is a problem with this website's security certificate.
If you get this screen/page, all you need to do is to click on the second link on the page that says "Continue to this website (not recommended). "
Then on the next screen you will get a login screen. This is a login to the VMWare Infrastructure interface - you can login using the username and password that you use to login to the computer. So if you login to the computer using "myname" and with password "mypassword", then you use the same username & password to login to this VMWare web interface.
If your machine is in the domain, you do not need to include your domain name in the login process. So instead of login with DOMAIN\username, just use "username".






2. Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage.
If you get this screen when you open the VMWare Server Home Page, I will check several things: a) Is the URL correct? b) Is the port number correct? c) Is VMWare Host Agent service running? You can check this in "Services", located in Administrator Tools under Control Panel. If this service does not exist, you will need to reinstall VMWare Server. If it is there and not running, you need to start it. Once it is started, close all browser with VMWare stuff in it, and try again.
Also keep in mind, in FireFox or other browsers, it may look different.

3. VM Ware also has this tool that's called VM Ware Converter 3.0. This is a very useful tool to convert your physical PC into a VM or vice versa. It also allows you tp change the configuration of your VM by cloning it. The free version has limited functionality, but it should be able to do the things I mentioned above. The paid version has more robust functionality.

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