[NTLUG:Discuss] The insanely cool VMware Player

[Robert Pearson]

The insanely cool VMware Player
By Mark Gibbs of Backspin, Gearhead and Gibbsblog

Last week we finished with a brief discussion of VMware's free
VMware Player, which is essentially an amazingly useful run-time
for virtual machines that runs under Windows and Linux.

<http://www.networkworld.com/nlgibbs112925>

More on VMware Player---

Excerpt from <http://www.networkworld.com/nlgibbs112073>

Our next book is back to a topic that we discussed in Gearhead and in
Backspin: virtualization. Virtualization: From the Desktop to the
Enterprise by Chris Wolf and Erik M. Halter (Apress) covers a large
chunk of the commercial virtual machine market, including Microsoft
Virtual PC and Virtual Server and all of the VMware products.

The subtitle is accurate in that the book does span the territory from
the desktop to the enterprise and details installation, configuration
and management of virtualization products. As for the enterprise end,
there are chapters on using virtual file systems, building failover
and load-balanced clusters, and virtualizing storage.

What we particularly like about Virtualization is that it is detailed
and contains lots of information that complements the documentation of
the products. This book leads us to our second topic: virtualization,
specifically VMware's VMware Player. The VMware Player is essentially
a run-time for VMs and works under Windows and Linux. As was noted in
Gibbsblog in October when it was released: "Crucially, this isn't just
for [VMware's] own VMs, but also for VMs created with Microsoft's own
virtual machine environment, Virtual PC [and Virtual Server] as well
as Symantec LiveState Recovery disk formats."

Amazingly, the Player is free. The player won't create VMs, but it
will run prebuilt ones. A number are available.

Among the VMware-provided VMs are Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Server
9, Novell Linux Desktop 9 Virtual Development Environments, Red Hat
Linux Virtual Development Environment, IBM Workplace Express, BEA
Weblogic, MySQL Workplace, Oracle 10g, SpikeSource Core Stack
(SuSE/Fedora Core 3 with a fully integrated LAMP Stack and more than
50 integrated components and utilities) and the Browser Appliance.

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To contact: Mark Gibbs

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, and columnist
and he writes the weekly Backspin
<http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/gibbs.html> and Gearhead
<http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/gearhead.html> columns
in Network World, as well as the Gearblog blog
<http://www.networkworld.com/weblogs/gearblog/> . We'll spare
you the rest of the bio but if you want to know more, go to
<http://www.gibbs.com/mgbio>. Contact him at
<mailto:webapps at gibbs.com>
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