VMWare Server - lightweight host / "esx-like" host

[lord_emperor]

Hello all.

I would like to run VMWare server on some old hardware, for the moment it's a PIII 733 with 640MB of RAM, however this will just be a proof of concept before I invest in something more permanent (thinking an Atom 330 / 2GB RAM, PICO-PSU).

It'll be used to run ~3 VMs permanently + transient VMs for personal experiments.

Obviously it cannot run ESX as it is nowhere near the narrow hardware requirements.

So I imagined I could install VMWare Server (free version) on a lightweight linux host.

Question is, what host would be best for this?

I picked up ubuntu-minimal today and will likely try it out tonight, however if there is a custom distro meant for this that would be great.

Complexity may be an issue as I'm somewhat new at linux, however given a guide I can usually accomplish what I'm aiming for.

 

[sabregen]

Oh wow...I don't even know what to say, here. that hardware is going to KILL you. In order to run 3x vms, you're probably going to want a physical hard drive per VM, as I'd imagine we're talking about IDE disks here, or a SATA disk behind a PCI controller...which on a P3 system will liekly not have bus mastering, so it will be in constant contention with all system level deivces that are also attached to the PCI bus.

I will be the first to say:

I wish you luck
I hope you find better hardware in the meantime
I can't help you on the Linux distro, or guide
This sounds like an experiment in patience, at best

 

[lopoetve]

Wait, you're going to run VMs on an Atom?!?

 

[jtg1993]

Wait, you're going to run VMs on an Atom?!?

You'd actually be surprised. I had 3 Ubuntu server vms in Virtualbox while I was running Ubuntu as the main OS on my Netbook and this is only with 1GB ram (my main OS was using about half of it). In this netbook it is only a single core atom with HT, the atom he wants to use is dual core with HT so it shows up as 4 cores. But I wouldn't recommend using an Atom for VMs because it would be way to slow for what the OP wants, instead of the Atom + 2GB ram pick up a cheap Amd Dual Core and 2 or 4gb ram.

 

[lopoetve]

You'd actually be surprised. I had 3 Ubuntu server vms in Virtualbox while I was running Ubuntu as the main OS on my Netbook and this is only with 1GB ram (my main OS was using about half of it). In this netbook it is only a single core atom with HT, the atom he wants to use is dual core with HT so it shows up as 4 cores. But I wouldn't recommend using an Atom for VMs because it would be way to slow for what the OP wants, instead of the Atom + 2GB ram pick up a cheap Amd Dual Core and 2 or 4gb ram.

No, it'll run - just very, very poorly. It won't be useful.

 

[sabregen]

I have an XP VM on my Acer Aspire One (Intel Atom N270), which is running Vista 32bit as the host os, and Workstation 6.5. I use the Windows XP VM to do machine/device management when I go on site. It's very useful, but it does take a while to launch the VM. It's not fast, but when all you're doing is hitting web interfaces, CLI, SCP, SSH, Telnet, it's plenty fast for that.

 

[lord_emperor]

Thanks for letting me know how slow it will be. I kind of anticipated this, especially on the random junk I'll be using at first.

But I wouldn't recommend using an Atom for VMs because it would be way to slow for what the OP wants, instead of the Atom + 2GB ram pick up a cheap Amd Dual Core and 2 or 4gb ram.

I might be able to budget for that, the appealing thing about the atom was the MB+CPU for $80 (Canadian), but an AMD system shouldn't be a lot more especially if there's a huge performance increase. Thank you for your constructive response.

Can you provide any input on the host OS? So far I've setup Ubuntu minimal which has literally no services installed, it's still using 300MB of RAM.

 

[jtg1993]

Thanks for letting me know how slow it will be. I kind of anticipated this, especially on the random junk I'll be using at first.



I might be able to budget for that, the appealing thing about the atom was the MB+CPU for $80 (Canadian), but an AMD system shouldn't be a lot more especially if there's a huge performance increase. Thank you for your constructive response.

Can you provide any input on the host OS? So far I've setup Ubuntu minimal which has literally no services installed, it's still using 300MB of RAM.

Are you looking for a desktop os or server os. If you want server then look at Ubuntu server or Ubuntu-jeos which is super stripped down version of Ubuntu Server. For desktop then xubuntu. Also instead of Vmware try Virtualbox its super easy to setup with Cli or Gui and is fast.