Advantages of running VMware Server on 64bit Linux host

[Jeff Larsen]

On Jan 24, 2008 9:59 AM, wolf2k5 <wolf2k5 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 24, 2008 4:56 PM, Jeff Larsen <jlar310 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > VMware Server 1.0 is a 32 bit application itself, so there will be
> > some 32 bit libraries that need to be installed to support it, but it
> > works just fine.
>
> Do you happen to have a list of the 32bit libraries needed by VMware Server?

audit-libs.i386
compat-libstdc++-33.i386
cracklib.i386
cracklib-dicts.i386
dmraid.i386
expat.i386
fontconfig.i386
freetype.i386
glib2.i386
instsvc-drivers.i386
libgcc.i386
libselinux.i386
libxml2.i386
ncurses.i386
pam.i386
xorg-x11-Mesa-libGL.i386
xorg-x11-libs.i386
zlib.i386

This is everything i386 from the CentOS base that is installed on my
VMware host. Some of these may already be installed on a base 64 bit
system and some may have been required for Dell OMSA. When installing
the VMware RPM, it should tell you what you need.

> > We run VMware Server 1.0.4 with great success on CentOS 4 (x86_64).
> > I've been very happy with the results on a PE 860 with Quad Core Xeon
> > and 8GB RAM. Our VMs are pretty low in their CPU/RAM usage.
>
> I think I'll give a try to RHEL5.1 x86_64 as host OS and see it it
> works fine, before resorting to RHEL4.

EL5 is not officially supported by VMware 1.0. Stick to EL4.

> Do you run your VMs with a 32bit or 64bit OS?

32 bit. Our first VM host did not have VT support in the CPU, so we
had no choice. We never bothered to experiment with 64 bit after that.
For the size and needs of our VMs, it didn't really matter. Plus,
having them as 32 bit guarantees their portability to non-VT hardware
if needed.

--
Jeff