[CentOS] VMWare Sandbox

Thu Oct 30 20:10:48 UTC 2008
Phil Schaffner <Philip.R.Schaffner at NASA.gov>

Thom Paine wrote:
> 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.

Yes.

> My current server is RHEL3, which is getting dated, and I think that I
> should refresh this server entirely in the move to ldap.
> We need to have an ldap server for publishing email addresses for a
> VPN for a nursing home that the upstream can harvest and we can browse
> to send confidential patient records.
> 
> RHEL3 prollie won't cut it, so I'm considering moving to CentOS5.
> 
> If I get a nice working test environment working, I wondered about
> running the server on VMWare, because the hardware will likely need to
> be refreshed in 2 years anyways. Copying the vmware file and the data
> to a new server would make for a fast upgrade.

Should work if you can afford the performance hit of VMware overhead. 
Would probably want to use bridged networking.

> Any feedback on what I am attempting to do here? Any other
> recommendations on how I should tackle this?
> 
> Currently I'm using Samba 3 with passdb. It's nothing fancy, but it works.
> We have about 20 XP machines here.
> 
> The server also hosts mail as well.

Does not seem like a big load.  Pretty easy to give it a try.  You can 
even DL a CentOS VMware pre-built image for Player and bypass installation:

http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware/
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/

Phil