Hi
Just finished installing LX-Office (A german fork of SQL-Ledger) on SME 7.
The SME 7 Server is running encapsulated in VMWare - on my Notebook.
It is setup with 2 LAN NICS, one pointing to a Host-Only Network (Developer-LAN), the other using VMWare-NAT. That ensures I can develop stuff on SME and get to the Internet even using a restricted WLan for Uplink as I am at the moment. No way I could get (or even want) to set up SME Server to use this WLan - the owners allow me to use my notebook only.
But this Setup is great.
Browser/Putty on Notebook - SME7 (eth0/LAN)
SME7 (eth1/WAN) - VM NAT (
VM NAT - Notebook WLan > Internet
Actually, the latest VM Workstation is more advanced than the server versions, but as rule of the thumb,
Workstation 3x = GSX2x
Workstation 4x = GSX3x
Workstation 5x = VMWare Server (cur. Beta)
That way, the "seen" Hardware and BIOS are more or less equivalent.
Linux based stuff, especially servers without fancy grafic or sound aren't that fussy about the hardware. NT wasn't that fussy either, but 2000, 2003, XP... A new NIC might cause a re-registration ;-(
The mentionned time issue with SME7 doesn't bother me, as I have three stable NTP servers on the net, and they act as master NTP Servers.
A personal tip:
Always keep the last and current Version of VMWare handy, upgrading the virtual hardware (a VMWare internal thing) is usually not much problem.
Have fun.
A.