Setting Up A Virtual Linux Web Server Part 1 : The VMware Server

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I started as a webmaster about 13 years working for a small ISP which mainly hosted websites on Linux boxes. At that time, a 128 Kb ISDN link was enough to feed about 5 servers running about 100 websites. Most residential Internet users were connecting through those hot 14,400 bps modem that just came out. The sky was the limit.

Today, I’m still managing a handful of web servers, probably not as many as I once did. Still, most of them are running Linux and I’ve got maybe 2 or 3 web servers running on Windows and IIS. Nowadays, I’m more into dynamic website development. There isn’t a day that I don’t need to test different configurations whether it is to test new versions of PHP, Apache or MySQL or simply to optimize server performance.

As you’ve probably experienced before, testing out new technologies may compromise your server’s stability and performance. That’s where testing servers come in handy. The thing is that you may not have a bunch of computers waiting to be reinstalled over and over just for that purpose. This is why we are going to install our own web server running on a virtual Linux box hosted on a Windows plateform.

Getting VMware Server

Now you can get VMware server for free and it’s a full version! Totally legal! How cool is that? At the time of writing this post, the latest VMware server version is 1.0.3. You can get it here :

http://register.vmware.com/content/download.html

or you can try this direct link to the binary file :

http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmserver/VMware-server-installer-1.0.3-44356.exe)

Before you go any further, please note that you will need a truckload of resources to run a virtual server, mostly RAM. I run an Intel Dual Core 1.8 Ghz computer with 2 Gb of RAM and 250 Gb of hard disk space.

Now that you’ve downloaded VMware Server, launch the installation and select the custom setup type. When asked to specify what features to install, you may want to disable the “VMware Management Interface”.

Why? Because this installs a web application through which you can manage your VMware server. Now this may not be a problem but you’ll need IIS to be installed and running if you want that option. For my part, I prefer using the GUI provided with the installation as I already got an Apache HTTP server running locally on my host machine and I don’t want to mess that up. You can pretty much leave all other setup options to default.

The VMware setup will install a virtual NIC (Network Interface Card). You may want to keep that in mind if you eventually run into network problems with other applications such as a VPN or a software firewall.

When done installing, reboot your computer and voila! A brand new VMware server on your PC.

Come back soon as we will continue the installation of our virtual Linux web server.

Setting Up A Virtual Linux Web Server Part 2 : Preparing VMware Server For CentOS 5 Installation.

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