I have been hav­ing, to put it light­ly, some prob­lems with VMware server and an Ubun­tu guest. My guess as to why is this: VMware server is, in my eyes, built for pro­duc­tion-level server vir­tu­al­iza­tion. It’s not re­al­ly built for on-the-side home server vir­tu­al­iza­tion, like the kind that I’m do­ing, and on fair­ly desk­top-ori­ent­ed hard­ware to boot. Ba­si­cal­ly, my Ubun­tu in­stall often has trou­ble with disk ac­cess, and some­times net­work ac­cess as well. (I’m run­ning a Vis­ta Home Premi­um host with an Ubun­tu Server 8.04 guest.)

My disk ac­cess prob­lems prob­a­bly stem from the fact that my VMware disk and my sys­tem boot disk are both the same par­ti­tion and the same disk. This prob­a­bly caus­es all sorts of ac­cess is­sues, espe­cial­ly while my com­put­er is boot­ing (I have no­ticed that my com­put­er takes forever to stop thrash­ing the disk after log­ging in). The net­work prob­lems are more eva­sive, how­ev­er. I’m us­ing the NAT net­work­ing in­ter­face so that I can as­sign my Ubun­tu a stat­ic IP ad­dress that will nev­er change, even if my phys­i­cal com­put­er changes lo­ca­tion (and it will, often). How­ev­er, pret­ty fre­quent­ly the DNS “server” that VMware pro­vides breaks down, and while Ubun­tu is able to send pack­ets to the net­work, it can­not per­form DNS queries through the lo­cal DNS ser­vice. Oc­ca­sion­al­ly, the net­work will fail to op­er­ate al­to­geth­er, and Ubun­tu will be un­able to send any pack­ets any­where (in­clud­ing to the host com­put­er!). This is a prob­lem which I’ve looked for so­lu­tions for on­line, but have so far come up with noth­ing.

Fi­nal­ly, I would like to be able to serve files from the host com­put­er through a web server on Ubun­tu, and my cur­rent method of mount­ing the host shares with CIFS and then shar­ing them with Apache is not op­ti­mal (the least of the prob­lems with this method is re­dun­dant net­work usage). I would like to get the VMware shared fold­ers fea­ture work­ing, ex­cept that I can­not seem to com­pile the VMware tools’ ker­nel mod­ules on Ubun­tu 8.04 (even fol­low­ing other ref­er­ences on­line). VMware’s ker­nel mod­ule builder is not quite as pol­ished, ev­i­dent­ly, as others’ (like nVidia).

Hope­ful­ly I will find so­lu­tions to the­se prob­lems soon, as I re­al­ly like the idea of run­ning a vir­tu­al­ized Lin­ux server on a Win­dows host, and hope that this sort of ar­range­ment will prove fruit­ful.