Fusion and VMWare Server compatibility

I created a guest Windows 2000 Pro SP4 using Fusion build 36932. I then tried to open this guest OS in VMWare Server version 1.0.1. I got an error message saying that this guest OS was created by "Fusion that has more features" and the "boot" did not proceed any further. However, Fusion build 36932 has no problem opening a guest OS (FreeNAS appliance) which I assumed was built under VMWare Server 1.0.1. So at the time of this writing, Fusion is better than VMWare Server in terms of being able to open guest OSes. The current build of Fusion however does not support several features that VMWare Server supports, namely Snapshot and ISO mounting. I do not know how well does VMware Workstation v 5.5.3 or v6 beta and Player supports guest OSes created by Fusion. Frankly I cannot keep up with all this neck-breaking pace development of virtual machines from VMWare. :-) But I love it.

Virtualization on top of virtualization

I wanted to have both VMWare Workstation 6 and Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (both are free and in beta) at the same time on my XP Pro machine. I was concerned that they would conflict. Actually, I found no info on the Web if there is a conflict or not. So I decided to install VMWare and VPC on SVS. This way, I can keep the two programs separated by "turn on" one or the other when I need to use it. Unfortunately, the virtual NICs in VMWare did not installed at all on top of SVS and VPC works initially, but when I restart the XP host and then relaunch VPC, there is an error about some driver and VPC would not launch. In short, I cannot install either VMWare and VPC on top of SVS. I will push ahead and install both VMWare and VPC without SVS and see if they do conflict.

Virtual machines on non-Intel non-AMD platforms

I recently bought a mini-ITX motherboard and tried to run VMWare's Workstation and Server and Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007 beta. The host OS is Windows XP Pro. Although I can install VMWare and Virtual PC virtual machine programs on the host XP, I get the blue screen of death for any XP guest OS I tried to install. The blue screen crash is on the guest OS, not the host OS. The documentation for VMware and Virtual PC clearly states that these will run on x86 Intel and AMD CPU. Although the CPU on the mini-ITX motherboard is x86, this case it's a Via CN700 EBGA CPU and the motherboard is Via VT8237R Plus chipset purchased though mini-box.com, VMWare and Virtual PC do not work. The CPU clocks in at 1GHz and there is 1GB of DDR2 533MHz RAM.

This is a disappointment because I had been thinking of using this low-power consumption system to run my 24/7 web/FTP server. I plan to run the server with the virtual machine so that if there is a problem, I can fix it easier.