[Echo Talon]

I'm thinking VMWare has just about sewed up the current round of this particular market. First time I ran Vista was on VMWare, in fact. I'd love a freebie Virtual Server, though.

I'm checking out VMWare Player as we speak... what else besides the player do i need? it says i need a configuration file? WTF is that? ***scratches head***

[Billthedrill]

Ah, the player's free, sort of a shell you distribute with a VMDK file, which is a virtual image. We send one out with a standard Linux or Winders web server distro on a CD so our customers can develop websites in an environment that (1) won't wake me up at night by eating my production websites, and (2) can be cloned, altered, or dynamited at will.

The config file tells it such things as whether you want the guest to be networked, NAT'ed, or run strictly locally, whether you want local or SAN storage (I don't know if Player is SAN capable but ESX is) how much memory to give the guest, how much CPU capacity, etc, etc. Pretty slick stuff.

[N3WBI3]

Echo try reading this whole thread..

http://pcs.hackaday.com/2005/10/24/how-to-vmware-player-modification/