Which flavor of VMWare?

What is the recommended VMWare product for use with pfSense? Can you get away with using VMWare workstation or is the server product the way to go? And are you using VMWare on top of windows or VMWare on top of linux?

sullrich

I'm using VMWare workstation 5.5 on top of XP.

This is for testing only as the LNC interfaces that are emulated are still BGL locked and performance sucks.

It's great for testing, however.

Any experience with VMWare on linux? I suspect it would perform faster but be semi-stable. Does this suspicion hold water?

sullrich

@submicron:

Any experience with VMWare on linux? I suspect it would perform faster but be semi-stable. Does this suspicion hold water?

Nope. Don't use linux, and don't ever plan on it.

Dido

I have the same virtual machine, running under Linux and Xp. I do not experience any difference, is working great in both cases.
I'm running VmWare 5.0

billm

@submicron:

Any experience with VMWare on linux? I suspect it would perform faster but be semi-stable. Does this suspicion hold water?

Network throughput won't be any better. You'll still be stuck with the BGL locked lnc driver in FreeBSD. I've had pfSense up and running on:
ESX 2.5.1
GSX 3 (I think)
Workstation 4.5.2/5.0/5.5
Player 1.0

I think ESX stopped working when we moved to FreeBSD 6 - if I get time, I'll see if can try it out again at work. I wouldn't use vmware for anything other than development/testing though.

–Bill

Yeah, I only intend to use it for testing, but since it seems like I'm re-installing pfSense ever day or two for various testing, having a couple of VMWare images would be very helpful.

billm

@submicron:

Yeah, I only intend to use it for testing, but since it seems like I'm re-installing pfSense ever day or two for various testing, having a couple of VMWare images would be very helpful.

I make heavy use of workstations snapshotting and cloning features. Very useful.

–Bill