September 16, 2005
You try being Developement, Ops and Product Management
Oh my God! VMWare Workstation 5 is going to dramatically change the way we use computers at MFConsulting. I may very well walk away completely or significantly reduced the number of removable hard drive caddies, KVM switches and computers dedicated exclusively to run Windows. Finally! I can now partition a new sexy computer completely for Linux.
This is so important, because being just one more server (mail server) away from completing the “Great MFConsulting Computer Upgrade of 2005”, I was still sadden by the fact that I had to keep some PCs (mainly the wife's computer) with an installation of Windows just so she could do her accounting package.
Thank you Todd Berman, Wade Berrier and Scott Dockendorf for the VMWare recommendation!
If you come from the Windows Server world and want to live a more affordable life, try Novell SLES for free, but don't do it until you get this: 
I am now done replacing a Windows 2000 Server and two Red Hat 9.0 boxes with two SLES and one SUSE 9.2 Pro.
Red Hat puts out a good product, but if you want live in perfect harmony with technologies that have thrived in Windows Enterprise architectures (For all you PDC fans ;)) you should really look into SLES, Mono and Sybase ASE. Now, if we could only convince the SUSE team to give us a Yast2 version that is GTK+ based...
It's a beautifull world we're living -- Devo :p
Posted by martinf at September 16, 2005 07:22 AMI've just discovered the joys of VMWare running on a Linux box, and now I wouldn't go back.
One of the best features for me is tunneling X across SSH. It means I can stick my big (noisy) VMWare machine away somewhere and run the interface locally on my much less powerful machine. I've even had success running it via Cygwin/X on my XP laptop.
Posted by: Schwuk at September 16, 2005 10:50 AM