Random Computer Bits

VMWare has interesting software, for several reasons. It has one of the best emulation technologies available to the consumer virtualization OS market, but more interesting than that is the way VMWare provides it. They have three main products: VMWare Player, VMWare Workstation, and VMWare Server.

They're meant as their names sound: VMWare Player is simply for playing virtual machines (not creating them), VMWare Workstation is for a full-featured virtualization environment on a single workstation, and finally VMWare Server is for a multiuser environment.

VMWare Player

Using logic, you can probably figure out that VMWare Player is free or nearly free. Well, it is. You can download premade "appliances" (preinstalled free operating systems on virtual disks, such as Linux) which you can use like you would use a normal operating system.

It's possible to get around this limitation by using a third party application to create virtual disks (in most cases qemu is usually used), and a .vmdk file is written up in a word processor, which become the settings of your virtual machine. Nice, although most people can see why VMWare Workstation would be more convenient in this respect.

VMWare Workstation

VMWare Workstation is the full-featured virutalization program for the end-user. You can create and edit virutal disks, settings, and a host of other features. And as you might expect, it costs money.

VMWare Server

VMWare Server, is naturally, the most full-featured of the three. Setup the server, and clients can connect, create and edit virtual machines, run them, etc. And the added benefit of it is that the server is handling all the processing for your virtual machine, which means that the speed at which you run your workstation is completely unaffected. "But how much does this cost?" you might ask. Nothing... both the server daemon and the client that connects to it are absolutely free.

It's rather interesting, when you think about it... the basic version is free, the super-full version is free, but the one smack-dab in the middle isn't. Which begs the question, why use VMWare Workstation? If you simply want a basic version and like using premade appliances, go right ahead and use VMWare Player. On the other hand, if you want a full-featured emulation environment, go ahead and install VMWare Server on your workstation. Then simply install the client, and connect to your localhost. Everything is where you would expect it to be.