A few clarifications about VMware Server and the Linux kernels

Linux VMware Virtualization
Friday, July 2nd 2010, 12:12
4 Comments

Since Ubuntu 9.04 appeared back in April, 2009, I’ve started building different scripts that use community supplied patches in order to make the install process of VMware Server as easy as it was supposed to be. Still it seems that many of the users of my scripts misinterpret the help I offered by asking questions which have nothing to do specifically with the scripts but with how VMware Server works. To be clear in this aspect: I do not provide support for any of VMware’s products.

When I began offering these scripts I simply tried to ease the process of installing VMware Server on various kernels shipped with the distribution I use. Considering to be a cumbersome job to manually apply patches or to start an install process, stop it in the middle, apply a patch and then continue the install, I thought that I could help by eliminating all these steps. The scripts are released with no kind of guarantee towards the success of using the product. Furthermore, it should be noted that VMware Server is not officially supported on Ubuntu > 8.04, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server  > 10.1, Mandriva Corporate Server > 4, Red Hat Enterprise Linux > 5.1 and two other less popular distributions.

Using VMware Server on any other distribution than the ones indicated above and in the “VMware Server User’s Guide” available here is solely your own responsibility. The only thing that I can guarantee to all of you using my scripts is the success of installing VMware Server on the unsupported kernels, a process which would fail without patching different files from the package. The fact that you might not be able to use all the server’s features is not my problem and unfortunately you don’t have an official way to obtain support.

A piece of advice that I might give to you is to not use VMware Server on unsupported kernels/distributions unless you are forced to. There are several other type 2 hypervisors which could do the job of providing virtual machines: QEMU, KVM, VirtualBox (which can be daemonized), etc.

In conclusion, if you have VMware Server related problems please do not ask me for support. If you have problems in using one of the scripts I wrote I would be more than happy to assist but that’s the only thing I am able and willing to do for you.

Thank you!

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4 Comments

  • Lourens July 15th, 2010 at 11:10

    Thank You!!!

    These scripts probably saved me days of work.

    I used it with Ubuntu 10.04 and it worked like a dream.

    Reply
  • aureli August 13th, 2010 at 16:36

    nice script, thanks…

    if visit Barcelona have a beer!

    Reply
  • Martin Groenholdt August 19th, 2010 at 13:28

    Thanks for the effort, this script works fine on Linux Mint 8.

    Reply
  • Sam September 2nd, 2010 at 14:04

    Gotta say I love this script.
    I run vmware server on my Ubuntu desktop and they seem to release a new kernel weekly lately… Makes the update next to painless.

    Reply

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