[Discuss] Virtual Machine Update

[John Blomfield]

I am continuing to experiment with VirtualBox and now with Vmware 
Server, so here are some of my current findings.  As reported earlier I 
gave up on Vmware Server because I could not get it to build the kernel 
module on Fedora 8 as it was an "unsupported distribution".  I have now 
found a patch to fix the problem:

wget http://knihovny.cvut.cz/ftp/pub/vmware/vmware-any-any-update110.tar.gz
tar xvfz vmware-any-any-update110.tar.gz
cd vmware-any-any-update110
./runme.pl


In contrast to VBox, Vmware requires a bit more work to install even 
with the patch but once its done the GUI is quite slick.  However, so 
far I found two areas where VBox has the edge.  Sharing files in Vmware 
requires running the appropriate network sharing protocols e.g. Windows 
sharing, Samba, Linux NFS etc depending on the host / guest OS 
combination, whereas VBox has a very simple method of using a host 
server URL.  I am assuming the network method would also work if you are 
using bridging and not NAT on the Guest.  Actually I found setting up 
bridge networking on Vmware is easier than with VBox.  The other factor 
with Vmware is that Version 1.04 does not support USB. Version 2.0 does 
but is still in beta.

John Blomfield