New to virtualization.

Well I've got a computer that I've set up as a lab machine so I can do training on, and I want to install other operating systems on it as well, but I'm new to using virtualization software.

My lab computer has the following hardware and OS:

Socket AM2 Asus motherboard
Athlon 64 X2 2.6Ghz processor
4 gigs of Corsair ram
3 x Seagate 80GB SATA2 hard drives in a RAID5
IDE DVD burner
Matrox workstation video card
Windows XP Pro

I'd like to buy a copy of VMware, but do not know which one to get or which one can be used with the hardware that I have. Operating systems I'd like to run in VMware are: Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Linux (don't know which version, but this is further out).

I've been looking at the VMware site and they seem a lot of products, but don't know which particular ones to look at.

Would VMware Workstation work on my machine? I read through the supported hardware list for it and did not see support for SATA drives, has that changed since its release or is that still the case?

I'd appreciate any help you guys can provide.

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astorrs

VMware Workstation is what you're wanting, you can download an evaluation copy here.

Nobylspoon

Is VM Workstation able to run Windows server 03 or 08 along with multiple XP and Vista clients all virtual to simulate a small network to practice on or would I need one of the other programs from vmware to do this?

dynamik

It certainly is. You're only going to be limited by your CPU, memory, and disk(s).

If you're looking for free virtualization, check out VMware Server or VirtualBox. I prefer Workstation, but you may be able to live without some of the features if you'd rather save $189. Also, if you go with Server, I believe you'll need to get the beta of 2 if you want to run Server 2008.

Nobylspoon

Awesome, thanks.

Im running an Intel Core2 Extreme Quad-Core, 8GB RAM and 3 TB of HDD, I would assume that is enough to run a server and a couple of clients.

I will go ahead and try out the eval of Workstation. Thanks for your help.

jibbajabba

Nobylspoon wrote:

Awesome, thanks.

Im running an Intel Core2 Extreme Quad-Core, 8GB RAM and 3 TB of HDD, I would assume that is enough to run a server and a couple of clients.

I will go ahead and try out the eval of Workstation. Thanks for your help.

This is plent of oompf for vms ... speaking of 2008 .. if you want to setup a test environment etc., use one standard server core using DNS and AD .. you can use REALLY limited resources .. After the installation I managed once to put the ram down to 256MB and 10GB of disk ... so you COULD keep it limited ...

bwcarty

Nobylspoon wrote:

Awesome, thanks.

Im running an Intel Core2 Extreme Quad-Core, 8GB RAM and 3 TB of HDD, I would assume that is enough to run a server and a couple of clients.

I will go ahead and try out the eval of Workstation. Thanks for your help.

I use a Q6600 CPU and 4GB RAM, and I can run my test environment (2-4 servers and 1-2 clients) in VMware Workstation while playing WoW on the host

gorebrush

Q6600 @ 3.6GHz
8GB
1TB in RAID-0 - 3 disks...

It eats up VM