The BrainStomp Blog Tech for your small business

     I have been playing with VMWare Server 2.0 Beta and I have to say, this is impressive. The upgrade from 1.x of my virtual systems went though flawlessly and the new interface is what the UI should have been for this product from the beginning. If this is your introduction to VMWare then it should have a very memorable impact, this UI delivers that impact. I think that VMWare will sell more licenses of its other products based on the experiences that people have with this free version as opposed to the prior free version.
    If you are used to VMWare server but not used to ESX or their infrastructure product then this will be a bit of a shock. The console is gone in favor of a fully web driven experience, so if you want to connect to the virtual machines and if you want to look at overall performance you only have one place to go. As with its Infrastructure line you can go to a web server hosted on the IP address of the host machine and it automatically transfers to an HTTPS session. From there you have to login to be able to look at things and install the required plug ins that will allow you to actually connect to the console of the guest systems. There are built in plug ins for Firefox and for Internet Explorer and both worked under my tests.
     If you are already running VMWare server 1.x you should seriously consider testing the Beta of v.2, if you are not already running VMWare sever - what are you waiting for? This is the perfect environment to test out applications and operating systems.