Installing VMware server on Debian etch

VMware Server installs on any existing server hardware and partitions a physical server into multiple virtual machines by abstracting processor, memory, storage and networking resources, giving you greater hardware utilization and flexibility. Streamline software development and testing and simplify server provisioning as you utilize the ability to “build once, deploy many times.”

In this tutorial we’ll install the free VMware server 1.x and VMware Management Interface to a Debian etch system.

First install required packages

apt-get install kernel-headers-`uname -r` psmisc libx11-6 libx11-dev xspecs libxtst6 libXt-dev libXrender-dev libxi6 lvm-common lvm2 xfsprogs


Download and extract source

cd /tmp
wget http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmserver/VMware-server-1.0.6-91891.tar.gz
tar zxvf VMware-server-1.0.6-91891.tar.gz


Install

cd vmware-server-distrib/
./vmware-install.pl


You will be asked a bunch of questions in the installer and the defaults will fit for most systems.

Install VMware Management Interface (optional)

cd /tmp
wget http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmserver/VMware-mui-1.0.6-91891.tar.gz
tar zxvf VMware-mui-1.0.6-91891.tar.gz
cd vmware-mui-distrib
./vmware-install.pl


You can now access VMware server using the web management interface. Navigate to https://your-server:8333