Be Excellent To Each Other

Just perusing the VMWare site and am utterly confuzzled about which option I need.

I have a quad core PC, running Vista Business 64 bit. I need to set up three virtual machines - which do not have to be running at the same time or indeed may not be running as I use the Vista bit for email and all that stuff.

1 x XP Pro 32-bit
1 x Windows 7
1 x Windows 2003 R2

I'm going to be testing a couple of apps and either copying them to the VMs, or connecting to them (in the case of the Win 2K3) server.

Does the free VMWare (Player?) allow me to do this? Am I right in saying ESXi is a boot thing? (Therefore not allowing me to use Vista.)

ESXi is, I think, a hypervisor "boot thing", yes - no user interface at all, you have to administer it from one of the virtual machines (or a different computer). You could maybe dual boot it, but otherwise you'd be installing Vista as a guest. Hypervisors are so small and lightweight, though, that you might not even notice.

I think the Player will only boot existing images.

Sun VirtualBox is fast and free, but a cunt about serial ports*.
MS VirtualPC '07 is slow(er, not too bad if you have hardware virtualisation) and free, and slightly less of a cunt about serial ports**.

* It seems to grab all address space as PCI, so Windows refuses to use the legacy COM ports you set up.
** It seems to drop bytes. I have now modified one of my old development tools to sit between a COM port and Named Pipe, then set Virtual PC to talk to the latter instead of directly to the former. Awesomes.

I've forgotten what it's called but you want the free thing that used to be called GSX. Vmware Server, maybe. It installs as a Windows Service and can create VMs; other than that it's pretty similar to Player (which was a stop-gap product).

I use VMWare. It's simple, and runs anything we've thrown at it so far, including Win7.

Another Vote for VirtualBox for me. Never had any issues with it.

But which VMWare. Their website is shockingly bad at helping you find the product you need.

Hang on a sec... VMServer is free. It looked like it was VMWare for Servers, so I didn't find that bit.

My employer has moved almost all our live web servers to VMware now and it's fucking great. You can bounce a VM node from one blade to another (say if you are taking a blade down for maintenance, or changing allocation for load balancing) with less than two seconds of downtime. That's science fucking fiction.

Only our SQL Servers run on physical kit now, because SQLOS does not play well with VMWare.