VMware Server 2 Updated

VMware Server 2.0.2 was released on October 26, 2009 as a maintenance release to the Type II hypervisor. As with all VMware product, the best resource to see what is new for this version is to read the release notes. For 2.0.2, there are really no corrected issues of interest. More importantly, there is no support for two newly released operating systems: Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. The base release of Windows Server 2008 is available on VMware Server 2.0.2 for both x86 and x64 editions, however. Even so, it is somewhat disturbing that there is a long list of known issues for the 2.0.2 release.

VMware Server is a Type 2 hypervisor, which runs on top of an operating system such as Windows or Linux. Check out this blog post from earlier in the year differentiating Type 1 and Type 2 hypervisors. VMware Server has a lot of internal pressure of sorts from ESXi. ESXi is free as well, but is a Type 1 hypervisor. There are realistically two reasons that VMware Server would be chosen over ESXi. The first would be hardware compatibility and the second would be the preference of a host operating system.

Many users have not liked the VMware Server 2 series for the less than optimal console and Web-only administration tools. The version 1 series had a Windows client that was very reliable and favored by many users of the two (see Fig. 1).

Figure 1. VMware Server 2 features a web-based administration console. (Click image to view larger version)

Though this release is somewhat flat, I still have upgraded one of my lab environments to version 2.02. VMware Server 2.0.2 is a free product and is available for download at the VMware Web site.

Posted by Rick Vanover on 11/12/2009 at 12:47 PM