Two months ago, I decided to convert my servers to Ubuntu Linux from Windows 2008. The conversions all went well, and I had a very nice configuration setup.
But VMware Server just didn’t work the way I needed it.
VMware Server and Workstation have a real hard time living on Linux boxes. Every time I’d stop the VMware services, they would lock the Ethernet module. I would have to reboot the server to get things back. Then, the startup script would crap out and say I would need to re-run the vmware-config.pl script. That would complain about the modules already existing so I’d have to manually delete those and start again.
Then, sometimes when it did start, it would mysteriously believe all the datastores were corrupt. To fix that I would have to remove the virtual machines, delete and re-create the stores, then re-add the virtual machines to them.
I’d complain about the web console itself, but that screws up with a Windows host as well.
So, as much as I really liked having Ubuntu installed – with NFS sharing drives between all machines, I just can’t live with the VMware problems. Especially since that’s the main purpose behind these boxes.
So, back to Windows they went. Windows 2008R2 is back on three of the four. The fourth will convert as soon as I have some time. I’ve already moved all the Linux apps back to a virtual machine running Ubuntu 10.04. I had to choose between running this WordPress site on Windows itself, or creating a Ubuntu virtual machine for it. I decided it was better to have a virtual machine since I can move it from host to host as needed.
Maybe I’ll try again next year, or when VMware Server 3 arrives – if ever.