VmWare

My license for my trial version of VMWare has no expired. I must say I have been very impressed by the power and simplicity of this software and intended to migrate my current home server to multiple VM's so improve both security and reliability.

I think the best feature of VMWare is the ability to add as many or as few hardware components to each VM you like. While my host PC had only one network card with only one IP address, I was able to set up one VM with Smoothwals, which contained 3 virtual network card, each with it's own IP address. Not only could the Smoothwall VM connect to the Internet through my existing network set-up, other PC's on my existing network could also see it. Additionally I set up three other VM's, Debian Linux, Windows 2000 and an copy of Windows 2003 Enterprise Server R2 which I acquired via the MS Beta testing program, all these exist on their own Internal Network and although a little sluggish at times (bearing in mind the host PC is a PIII with 700Mb RAM and a 1Ghz processor) it worked perfectly.

Another neat feature of VMWare is the ability to take snapshots of an entire VM should you need to make a critical change. If anything goes wrong you just revert back to the snapshot. No orphan registry keys no having to fath about deleting files and finding out how to under the mess you make.

You can limit the amount of memory each VM can have, specify how much hard disk space it is allowed, have several virtual disks set up as a RAID array if you like and as many CD drives as you wish as you have the option of using ISO images in place of real CD's.

The best part of all, is, the VM has no idea that is is in fact a VM running off a host PC with Windows or Linux, it thinks its a real PC and in my opinion its this degree of isolation which makes VMWare ideal when hosting multiple websites; perhaps one for an Internal LAN and one for the Internet and a dedicated mail server and FTP server. Should any of these servers be compromised, the attack can only do very limited damage and if you take regular snapshots then you will be able to use your time on figuring out how the system was compromised instead of using it to restore and reconfigure your system.

Although I am seeking a student discount on the license, I would be quite happy to pay the full $189 for the license and would urge any other web developers and software developers out there to give it a try themselves.

www.vmware.com