Free VMWare
Okay, this is probably old news to everyone by now, but since everyone is talking about the VMWare IPO, I figured it was a good time to bring it up.
In case you geek readers out there haven’t see this, you can still download the VMWare server for Linux for free. TechRepublic has an entire article about downloading and installing VMWare. (Yeah, yeah, okay, it’s a beta version, but from everything I hear, it’s good to go.) Now, I’ve used the full, very expensive, version of this and it pretty much rocks. If you absolutely must run Windows server in an otherwise Linux envrionment, this would be the way I would choose to do it.
If you’re absolutely married to Windows and want to try VMWare, you can either download the server version or the “player“. Now, the thing to keep in mind is that the player will run virtual machines that were created with the full product, but, as far as I can tell, won’t create its own virtual machine. So, if you don’t already have virtual machine files somewhere, you’ll have to Google for them.
Oh, and if you’re looking for something to play with on this, but don’t feel like Googling for a good virtual machine? Why not try the free Mono VMWare image from Novell?
