Topic: Virtual Windows XP

[edform]

Has anyone looked into running an equivalent to Windows Terminal services on an SME server?

I have a small but increasing demand among my clients for remote operation of Windows applications with substantial data movement during operation and this cannot be done by running the application on the remote machine and reading the data from the office server over a VPN; even with a 512K upload capability it's just too slow.

What I can do, and have been doing for some time now, is to allow remote users to take control of the dektop of their actual 'in-office' PC from a remote workstation using VPN + Windows Remote Desktop Connection, but this is a kludge that can go badly wrong at times - particularly when using Outlook on the in-office machine if the PST file is really big.

What would be cool is to synthesise an exact analogue to Windows Server Terminal Services, where each virtual machine runs in say a VMWare instance and can be addressed from a remote workstation on a one-to-one basis.

Has anyone tried this, and if so, where would I begin? As I recall the reason I dropped the idea a year or so back was because VMWare needed X services on the host server!

Any tips and pointers would be useful before I dissapear into the test server and break it really comprehensively.

Ed Form

[duncan]

VMWare server is now free and does not need X to host Windows XP (It does need some XFree libraries however).

RDP inside VMWare is noticeably slow but does work well enough.

There is a Service pack 2 "patch" that will allow multiple RDP connections to occur at any given time to Windows XP. We use it here and it performs flawlessly. A better idea than having multiple virtual machines running.

[duncan]

PS - Whats really cool is to install IIS and Tsweb. You can then run a remote desktop connection inside Internet Exploder from pretty well anyware.

No need to worry about RDP clients - just a little activex.

[jazbokes]

Try FreeNX..and XP Patch mentioned on previous list

1.#yum  --enablerepo=base enablerepo=updates --enableblerepo=extras install expect nc freenx nx

2..Patch your TS XP PC with this Patch
3. Support and Documentation

http://fedoranews.org/contributors/rick_stout/freenx/
http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/freenx-knx/
http://www.nomachine.com/

4 Not tested and use at your own risk

Jon

[duncan]

RDP inside VMWare is noticeably slow but does work well enough.

If you add

Code: [Select]

debug = "FALSE"
logging = "FALSE"
mainMem.partialLazySave = "FALSE"
mainMem.partialLazyRestore = "FALSE"
mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"
to the .vmx file for the virtual machine - you will find that the machine speed improves quite a bit.

[NicolBolas]

Are you able to run vmware-server on a SME machine flawlessly? I always got issues with some init scripts breaking the virtual interfaces, how did you fix that?

[duncan]

Seems to run here with no problems - I have some issues with vmmon starting that I havnt bothered with.

Can you give some examples I can check

[nemtex]

Hi,

Could someone briefly run through the install procedure for VMware server on an SME box. I want to install XP so I can run a couple of windows only programs on the server. Main reason is that we wont need to have 2 machines running when only 1 is necessary. (Small business trying to keep the bills down)  

I have looked through post and searched the forums and I can only find info for SME 6.

I understand I will need a few X libraries but I don't know enough about SME/Linux's workings to know which ones or the best way to install them.

Many thanks in advance.

James

[duncan]

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=30838.0

[nemtex]

Thanks for that, just what I was after.  

James

[nemtex]

Just got this installed and everything seems to have installed with no problems, however during bootup I get an error saying VMware services cannot start because module vmnet is not loaded

"Module vmnet is not loaded.  Please verify that it is loaded before running this script"

Could anyone shed some light on what I need to fix this. I'm sure its just a line or two needed in a config file but I'm very much a noob when it comes to these sorts of things and not sure where to look.


Many thanks

James

[nemtex]

The problem seems to have sorted itself out after a couple of reboots....

It works incredibly well in fact I can't believe how fast it is and stable (well thats just jinxed it   ).

Thanks for your help with this, it really has solved so many problems.

James

[gocdo]

While talking about terminal server options, I have been using a neat server product from xpunlimited.com. Make an XP/pro box a ts server and it works really well.

Am currently working with vmware so will see how the combinations go.

Kevin

[buknoy]

Did someone successfully installed an SME7 on a VMware Workstation 5.5 running on Windows XP home? I tried doing this but the SME7 won't install because it could not find any hard disk. Any suggestions?

Thanks

[william_syd]

Did someone successfully installed an SME7 on a VMware Workstation 5.5 running on Windows XP home? I tried doing this but the SME7 won't install because it could not find any hard disk. Any suggestions?

Thanks

Try making the disk bigger.

http://bugs.contribs.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1239