Tonight I finally got around to installing vmware server on my new vmware box. I used a couple sites as my guides. Ever since starting Linux, I’ve learned to keep “journals” about what I’ve installed and the voodoo needed to get some things working for future reference. I’m getting better about putting my notes down into a more polished form early, but I still might get one or two things wrong here. I’ll try to update as needed, but I suspect eventually these notes will just get ported over to the wiki.

I needed to install a few dependencies first since this is a fresh Ubuntu 6.10 install.

sudo apt-get install xinetd
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential

this folder will be used to hold the vms:

mkdir /var/vm

Download both files (server and management user interface) into a temp folder get a registration key while on the site. This is free and doesn’t require any valid information, not even email. The key will appear after submitting the form (the sales teams must love that!).

tar xvfz VMware-server-*.tar.gz
cd vmware-server-distrib
sudo ./vmware-install.pl

I answer /var/vm as the location for virtual machines. I also answer “no” for NAT or host-only networking (leaving me with bridged mode) as I really just want my VMs to be grabbing an IP off my network and have full access out to the Internet (at least on this machine).

Next is the MUI.

tar xvfz VMware-mui-*.tar.gz
cd vmware-mui-distrib
sudon ./vmware-install.pl

All defaults for the MUI. This should fail to start the httpd server at the end and needs a patch.

cd /tmp
wget http://users.piuha.net/martti/comp/ubuntu/httpd.vmware.diff
cd /
sudo patch -b -p0 < /tmp/httpd.vmware.diff
sudo /etc/init.d/httpd.vmware start

This is the location once it has started: https://localhost:8333.

To create VM, you will need to use the console (not the MUI) by heading over to Applications->System Tools->VMWare Server Console in the kicker.