Virtual fun with VMWare server

I've been having a bunch of fun with VMWare's VMware Server product which is now out of beta and freely available for free as in beer. I know that Microsoft has just made their own virtual PC product available for free too, I haven't tried it yet, but VMWare Server works great and also supports Linux. While I can see myself installing the Microsoft product for my clients (see below) I will be sticking with VMWare myself.

Having previously used the VMWare "player" product and some third party tools to cobble together my own custom machines it is nice to get my hands on the real thing - it's a lot easier than screwing around with config files and command line tools. More importantly now I can have my virtual machine(s) start at boot which is great for running a Linux Ubuntu machine in the background for stuff like email, FTP etc. which I'd rather keep well away from my real Windows machine.

I'd also been pondering if using a virtual machine for running a legacy OS and apps e.g. Win98 stuff, would be a good idea to get ludite users to upgrade to Windows XP. Well now VMWare Server and Microsoft's Virtual Server are both out there and for free I would say the answer is most definitely YES!

The only thing I haven't figured out is how to get an existing PCs disk into a virtual disk but I think I may have an idea... just use a regular disk migration program running in a virtual machine. I prototyped this idea just now using a virtual machine with a USB Host Controller, a blank IDE disk and a CD-ROM drive - I can hook up an external drive to my PC (actually a laptop) via a USB enclosure, boot up the virtual machine and it sees its fresh virtual disk and the external system disk.

So there seems no reason at all why I can't copy a current bootable system disk from a Win98 machine (or any machine) to a VMWare virtual disk this way. Whether the machine will boot with its new drive image I've no idea... I guess it would encounter all the problems of starting with a new motherboard that any migrated disk would encounter. There are probably ways to get around that - or I could just install a fresh Windows 98 virtual machine and migrate apps and data to it.

Anyway, suffice to say there is lots of fun to be had with virtualization!