[PLUG] VMware new (free) player

[Lee Marzke <lee@marzke.net>]

Several people were asking about VMWARE's new player at my Asterisk PLUG 
talk last night.

The Vmware Player is a free download,  that allows you to run 'virtual 
machines that
others have created.   

Get it here:   http://www.vmware.com/download/player/

This means you can:
  - run a virtual Linux machine on your Windows PC or laptop       -or-
  - run a virtual Windows machine on your Linux PC.

In practice,  the second option is limited, because Windows machines 
aren't free to distribute.
You would need the full Vmware product to create your own Windows 
machine with your
licensed Windows CDROM,  the player can't do this.

If you want to experiment, on the same web link above is "Vmware Browser 
Appliance" which is
a small UBUNTU Linux distribution with FireFox.    The UBUNTU has been 
stripped  of most
applications to reduce size,  but it does have Apt and Synaptic enabled 
so you can download
whatever else you want.  I immediately added Emacs and Thunderbird,  
which are saved on
your virtual disk file.  If you want the latest versions you have to get 
them directly from mozilla.org

Performance on my 800MHz  384Mb Thinkpad is almost as fast as native 
Linux, even while running
some Windows applications.    Sound and CDROM are supported, as well as 
a 'virtual' bridged or
NAT'ed Ethernet connection to your host OS.

A really interesting use of this technology would be to put your virtual 
disk on a USB stick.
While traveling  you could then run your own protected distribution on 
any Windows computer
that had the player installed.  My virtual machine is 1.7G so you would 
need a 2 or 4G stick.
Haven't tried this yet,  if anyone does I'd be interested in hearing 
about it.

You can do something similar with the Knoppix, or DSL linux and a memory 
stick but that
requires a re-boot of the host PC.

Lee Marzke

PS:  There are at least two pre-built Asterisk@Home virtual machines at:
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/community.html
This might be useful for preliminary eval,  but Digium and other HW 
cards don't work and
I would expect call quality to be less than a real server.


PS: Vmware has also released a free version of their entry level server 
product.




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