Virtualization is the new craze. I have been using VMWare Workstation since version 3.X and I always loved it, so when VMWare Server was made “free” I was thrilled. Installation on Linux is a breeze but people usually don’t see the actual potential that this Software Package has.
In my case, I need to test constantly something, new Microsoft Service Packs, Hacks, Exploits, Domain Group Policies, Linux/Windows Backup scenarios and so on. For this purpose VMWare Server is a godsend and in this tutorial/article I will show you why and how.

First off, I use VMWare Server on Ubuntu 6.10 Server. The reason? I like Ubuntu and the fact that it is actually well designed and the “Server distro” is just that, its for SERVERS. It uses less then 64MB after boot time and has nearly 0 services running! Of course you can choose whatever you want, just that throughout the article we will go with Ubuntu 6.10.

On the hardware side we have cheap written all over it. If you are like me, then a server needs to serve and not have bells and whistles hanging out the wazoo. The hardware we will install this on costs way less then 1000 Euros/Dollars. With 700 you should be fine actually.

Processor: Intel Pentium D 805 (Dual Core, 2MB Cache, cheap as hell!)
Ram: 3G DDR2 667mhz (You want as much as you can have)
Motherboard: Intel i945GM (Built in VGA, onboard Sound and Gigabit Ethernet)
Harddrives:

Primary: 300GB ULTRA ATA 133
Secondaries (the actual VMWARE disks): 2×250GB SATA 2, 16MB cache on 2 SATA channels

Case and PSU are generic and Zalman 400W.

Steps to take:

Step 1: Install Ubuntu 6.10 Server according to your needs, but I highly recommend using LVM (Logical Volume Manager) for Disk Management since you can easily add and remove disks.
When the installation is done, boot the machine up, make sure everything is ok and then type in the command prompt the follwing 2 lines:

sudo apt-get install ssh ssh-server
sudo apt-get upgrade

You can now log in remotely onto the server via SSH and are ready to prepare the machine for VMWare. NOTE: Since I will use this server for VMWare exclusively, I only selected DNS Server during the installation, NOT LAMP server.
Now I strongly recommend giving the machine a permanent IP address. Since the setup used Dynamic, you have to edit the file /etc/network/interfaces with

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

and change the last line from
iface eth0 inet dhcp to iface eth0 inet static .
Then you need to add the following lines (change the IP to reflect your configuration):
address 192.168.1.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.2

Save the file and restart networking. You will get disconnected and have to reconnect to the new IP (do sudo /etc/init.d/network restart).

Step 2: Install the necessary packages to install VMWare Server. Since VMWare depends on some files and the Ubuntu Server installation is pretty bare, you will need to install the following list of packages:
xinetd build-essential linux-headers-2.6.17-10-server libX11-dev libxtst6 xlibs-dev
If you, like me, want to administrate your VMWare server from your Mac you have to install a few more packages. This is because you need to isntall the VMWare Server Console on your server and run it remotely via SSH. Sounds complex? It really isn’t. Basically you create a SSH connection to your server and run the console on your server but get the interface on your Screen. THE TAO OF MAC has this process detailed explained and I will only explain what you need and how to make it work in Ubuntu. The packages you need additionally are libgtk2.0-0 and xauth.

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