Rob Golding

It’s arrived! The final release of VMware Server 2.0 was announced last week. Will you be upgrading?

I’m not going to make the leap just yet. I’ve just upgraded my system (see previous post), and so far it’s been up with not a single hickup since installation. I don’t expect to be ripping up all my hard work for a while yet.

One thing that is interesting my at the moment - what are people’s opinions on the new console? Personally, I think the new console is “sort of OK”. They have the right idea - being able to manage the machine from a remote location without installing client software first - afterall it is called VMware Server. This makes sense in theory, but the console is so sluggish and, in my experience so far, buggy - that it just doesn’t work yet. Starting and stopping virtual machines is slow, and the remote VM console takes a good number of seconds to launch. The interface is vastly improved from the beta that I covered in a post a long time ago, but still not perfect in my opinion.

Also, the console has its own Tomcat web server running on the host machine, which eats up a large amount of RAM. This is annoying at best, and disastrous at worst - when you need all the RAM you have for the Virtual Machines this software is supposed to be managing!

Anyway, I may install this on a test bed somewhere, but certainly not on my production system for some time. I’d love to know if I’m in the majority or the minority on this one.