A poor man’s VMWare Workstation: VMWare Server under Ubuntu 7.10 + VMWare Player under Windows XP
February 28th, 2008 by 
David Craddock
I finally setup my Dell Lattitude D630 laptop the way I wanted it last night, and thought I’d do a quick writeup about it. Here is the parttition table:
- A 40GB Windows XP partition, with VMWare Player installed, which I will be using for Windows applications that don’t play well in virtualised mode (eg media applications). I will also be using it as the main platform for running VMs.
- A basic 5GB root + 1.4GB swap 7.10 Ubuntu server partition, with VMWare Server installed (for creating, advanced editing and performing network testing on VMs). I used these VMWare server on Ubuntu 7.10 tutorials.
- A 36GB NTFS partition for storing VMs
- A 26GB NTFS media partition for media I want to share between VMs and the two operating systems on the disc.
We use VMWare servers at work to host our infrastructure, so this setup will be very useful for me. I can now:
- Take images off the servers at work and bring them up, edit them and test their network interactions under my local VMWare Server running on my Linux install.
- From within my windows install, I can bring up a Linux VM and use Windows and Linux side by side.
Posted in Uncategorized | 
March 2nd, 2008 at 9:57 am
Nice Setup, wish I had that much hard drive space.
I recently stumbled upon a fun way to install Linux onto most dell laptops. I used the 3.5 GB system recovery partition to install linux, and then used my primary partition with Windows XP to host most of “data” files.
Since I have the dedicated Virtualization server I don’t bother to to run any virtualization on my laptop, I just use Terminal Server Client or VNC to connect to the virtual machines on my server.
Out of curiosity what method do you use to connect to the “media” partition from within the virtual machines?
Thanks,
Bradford Knowlton
http://x86Virtualization.com
March 19th, 2008 at 8:13 am
Hi Brad,
Thanks for your comment. I haven’t actually setup the media sharing yet, but I was thinking of setting up a windows share and sharing media via the loopback address. I’d be interested in your thoughts on this, and if there is a better way to do this.
Thanks,
David