It’s true, I am a big dork.

Yesterday I set up a VM Server. That is to say, a server that holds a number of Virtual Machines. Wait, you probably don’t know what a virtual machine is. For starters, the cool geek acronym is VM. A VM is a fully functional computer that installed, well, virtually. The entire computer is contained within a single file on another computer. It is very cool technology and it getting too be very popular in industry.

The coolest thing about my VM Server is that it is completely free technology.

I installed a base install of Ubuntu Server on P4 2.8 GHz with 512 MB RAM . And then I installed the new free VMServer product from VMware. Once that was installed , I installed the VMware Server Console on my regular PC. This allowed me to create a few VMs on the VM Server. I started with a Windows 2003 Server install. It works well, if a bit slow. I was hoping to attach my external hard drive to the VMServer and have the W2k3 Server operate it as a Shared Drive, or actually a few different shared drives. But I had some issues with the VM consistently seeing the USB Drive. Having shared drives that aren’t always there is no good, so I put the external drive back on my main PC.

I also installed a LAMP Server in a second VM. This is a Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP Server. Basically, your standard open source web server. Next up will be a Vista VM. Although I expect that to be terribly slow.

I guess this whole project is kind of a proof of concept thing for me. To really do this right, I would need to max out the RAM and put a 300 GB Hard Drive in.

Like I said, I’m a dork. Nice way to spend most of a Saturday.

At least, later I went out and bought a few comic books.