VMware Server is very nice

I’ve been trying VMware Server at home, and it seems to me very much alike the GSX version, with to basic differences: it’s free and it’s fast.

I’ve already had previous experiences with QEMU and Parallels, and both seemed very sluggish to me, so I always prefered the VMware line of products. Even with those, I had bad experiences with Workstation, specially some crashes and inability to run on full screen mode when console was running in frame buffer mode. Now with the free version of VMware server, I’m quite satisfied with it, and I’ll be playing a little more with virtualization at home. We already have some copies of GSX at the office, so I’m very comfortable with this new product.

And before someone ask me anything like “why don’t you use Xen or KQEMU?”, I must say that I have my reasons: (a) KQEMU isn’t fast enough for graphical interfaces, and it’s not easy to have a “headless” virtual machine, (b) I found Xen quite difficult to setup, and I had some problems seting up multiple virtual machines, (c) from time to time (rarely) I need to emulate Windows (which Xen can’t easily), and at last (c) the company where I work already have some GSX servers, and they’re planning to have some ESX in the future, so some times I use my VMware at home to make experiments.