Virtual PC 2004 SP1 is now free ... big deal. VmWare Server on the other hand ...

Yeah, Virtual PC 2004 SP1 is now free, but so what? Even though Wikipedia says that the speed is near native, most other blog didn't give the Virtual PC too much praise. When talking about virtualization, VMWare is still the king.

In fact, VMWare Server is now free, and based on what I read, VMWare Server does what VMWare Workstation does, plus more.

While I install VMWare server, I realized the following things:
- You need to uninstall VMWare Workstation before you can install VMWare Server.
- You need to have IIS installed before you can install VMWare Server.
- The VMWare was intended to be installed on a server. When installing it on a Windows XP machine, I got a message saying "VMWare Management Interface is only supported on Server Operating system. You may encountered some issues when using VMWraae Management Interface on this system."

- [Extremly Important] Make sure you setup VMWare server so that it runs each instance using a System Account instead of any particular user account. That way, even after you log off your account, the VMWare instance that you started will still be running in the background. This is ultra important for me. To change such setting, go to VMWare Server Console, access menu [VM]->[Setting…]->{click Options tab}->[Startup/Shutdown] item -> Select radio button {Local System account}.

So far, the VMWare Server runs very well on all the machines that I installed in. Say goodbye to VMPlayer from now on.