[lugip] vmware?

[Tom Reingold]

I'm glad this discussion came out. I've been using vmware since April. I
worked at Seton Hall University in South Orange, NJ for a few months. There,
they have a huge commitment to vmware and are using ESX. Interestingly, they
recently came up with an interesting policy: vmware on everything. If an
application justifies occupying an entire server, they will still put vmware
on it and then a single VM for the application. This way, if the hardware
fails, they can move the VM to another machine quickly and easily.

I have vmware Fusion on my Mac and run Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu
Linux on it. Very nice.

I have a client who is in the web hosting business. He has a tiny budget so
we're using vmware server for now. Thanks for telling me about ESXi. I'll
check it out. My client rents servers from serverbeach.com and similar
companies. Serverbeach gives us a choice of host operating systems, and
ubuntu is not among them. Debian is a choice, and we're familiar with that,
so we use that. I've gotten to like Debian and find it pretty easy to
administer.

Version 1 of vmware server offers vmware server console which runs on
Windows and Linux. I'm satisifed with it. Version 2 has a similar thing but
it requires a web browser which must be either Firefox or IE, and it must
run on Windows. It requirest you to download and install a plugin for the
browser. I don't like this setup. Also, the console is awfully slow. I hope
they plan to improve this.

We tried ubuntu server as a guest operating system. One of my colleagues,
who does the programming for this project, found some library
incompatibility problem. I don't remember what it is, so we are using Debian
for some VM's and Suse for others.

I'm having a problem with the networking. Perhaps someone here can help. The
hosting company does not allow us to use NAT or bridged networking. They
require us to use host-only networking. We make this work by following their
suggestion of setting up NAT-like networking using iptables. So each VM gets
a public IP address. Recently, they issued us some new IP addresses that are
completely unrelated to the IP address of the vmware host. They won't tell
us the netmask or the default gateway for these IP addresses, and they tell
us that we don't need this. The VM's don't know where to route traffic. The
hosting company won't help us further. How can I do this? I bet it's a
simple matter, but I haven't figured it out.

Thanks.

Also of interest is that my client has one client who has the potential to
bring in lots of money. If that happens, then my client will have the money
to pay for vmware ESX.

Tom
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