Nice! Btw, VirtualBox does something like this out of the… Well, box. ;)

“Thanks to a tutorial on VentureCake, I was able to integrate my gnome desktop with Windows XP explorer for a seamless multi OS desktop environment.

The requirments for this trickery include VMWARE, rdesktop, SeamlessRDP, and XP PRO. Here is a screenshot of my desktop with Internet Explorer 7 and explorer running along side my Linux desktop applications…” – My Blog Post URL

[quote post=”2394″]We use virtualization extensively where I work. Our ‘enterprisey’ product requires an entire Windows machine to itself and is impossible to uninstall. So basically, we deploy it on VMware VMs in the lab and VNC into them from our desks. It’s a little slow, but it’s way more efficient than wiping a full computer with a ghost backup, which is what we used to do.[/quote]

Heh! That’s actually the best solution to this issue. I hate those enterprisey apps fuck up the whole system.

[quote post=”2394″]Out of curiosity, why do you use vnc instead of running a VMware console at your desktop and accessing the VMs remotely with that, or even using Remote Desktop which is faster than VNC (but is limited to one user)?[/quote]

It could be for consistency. Since vnc runs on just about everything, and most client/server combinations are compatible you have the same method to access every single remote server in the company whether it is real, virtual or running a different OS than you.

You need to access server XYZ? Fire up the VNC client, type in XYZ in the host field and you are done. Using something else would just complicate the issue. For example, rdesktop doesn’t work on Win NT and Win 2k (and linux/unix of course) so if you have these older systems amongst your servers you won’t be able to access them that way.

VMWare console will only work on virtual machines – but what if you need to connect to a real one?

So yeah, if I had few dozen servers, real and virtual and mix of different OS’s I’d go with vnc too, despite it being slower than some of the alternatives. :P

Out of curiosity, why do you use vnc instead of running a VMware console at your desktop and accessing the VMs remotely with that, or even using Remote Desktop which is faster than VNC (but is limited to one user)?

Honest answer? I don’t know; decisions like that are out of my control.

I do know that VNC is a legacy setup. It’s what we used before we started using VMware, so when we started using VMware it was already setup everywhere and established in everyone’s workflow. We use it not only to control the VMs but also the machine’s they run on. We do everything remotely these days.

[quote comment=”8788″]So basically, we deploy it on VMware VMs in the lab and VNC into them from our desks. It’s a little slow, but it’s way more efficient than wiping a full computer with a ghost backup, which is what we used to do.[/quote]

Out of curiosity, why do you use vnc instead of running a VMware console at your desktop and accessing the VMs remotely with that, or even using Remote Desktop which is faster than VNC (but is limited to one user)?

We use VMware at work for everything except DB work. We have ~50 virtual machines on 3 servers. It’s incredibably easy to tear down a machine and put a new one up (transfer speeds between hdd’s are fast). 3-4 minutes for a complete new machine.

Sure it’s a lot of work getting to there, constant updates and tweaking to get the max performance out of the OS.

Personally, I use them for testing out software and looking at dangerous places on the wild wild web ;)
Much easier to clean up a vm than a physical machine.

VMs are great provided you have the hardware. Most of my work is done in VMs to replicate complex environments. Today I’m running a Domain Controller, a SharePoint Server, and a Commerce Server all in separate VMs. My host machine is Vista 64-bit, 2.4 Quad core w/ 8GB of RAM. I have a XP sandbox VM for installing and downloading junk, and a couple vanilla Windows 2000 server, and 2003 VMs kicking around.

We use virtualization extensively where I work. Our ‘enterprisey’ product requires an entire Windows machine to itself and is impossible to uninstall. So basically, we deploy it on VMware VMs in the lab and VNC into them from our desks. It’s a little slow, but it’s way more efficient than wiping a full computer with a ghost backup, which is what we used to do.

At home however, I’ve never really gotten into VM’s, never needed them. I did once set up a Window’s VM, but quickly found out that there was nothing for which I needed to use it.