[CentOS] VMWare Sandbox

Am 30.10.2008 um 20:37 schrieb Thom Paine:

> I need to experiment with ldap for a site I manage, and wondered if
> vmware would be a good way to go for some testing.


You can use either VMware Server 2.0 or VMware VI3i, provided your  
hardware is supported.

VMware Server needs some OS as base (CentOS5 should do well), but 3i  
goes on the bare metal - it's based on RHEL, too, though.
4 GB of RAM is the absolute minimum.
I wouldn't virtualize all storage. Use a separate server and NFS mount  
all storage from that, if you can (maybe Samba is the exception - SMB- 
exporting NFS-mounted stuff makes Samba even more tricky than it  
already is).
But the less disk-I/O you've got to virtualize, the higher the overall  
performance you can yield.
You can virtualize mail, but only if it doesn't do much I/O. Else it  
will be painfully slow.
What's your storage?
How do you plan to backup stuff?

CentOS is not officially supported by VMware (probably never will).
If you have a problem, you're on your own.
And VMware is not open-source.

But I'm not sure if there's actually anyting in the market that is  
better than VMware (for full virtualization).


Rainer