OK!, now I’m up and running, but what am I going to put on it? First I thought I would put pristine versions of the OSs I normally use and they could be the starting point for any hosts I wanted to create in the future. I could simply clone them and I would be off and running. As well, I could use a clone to test patch installs, application upgrades or different ideas about any new applications before I installed on any of my servers or workstations. The only problem was the free VMware Server edition didn’t support VM Cloning. Not to worry, I quicky found a site that had detailed explainations on how to do it manually. Thanks Convergent Technologies.

The First System

I thought it would be a good idea to get all external facing applications off my file server. Here I have 1TB of RAID-5 disk containing 10s of thousands of mp3 music, photos, video, and purchased application installers downlaoded from various sites and I was running an IIS webserver that had many ports open to the internet. Probably not a good idea incase it got hacked. I decided I was going to move the external facing applications to a VM to protect my file server contents.

So, I installed windows, configured IIS, moved all my webite content to the new “webserver” VM, and reconfigured my router to point to the new webserver.

Next I wanted to move my “torrentserver” off the old Pentium II and get rid of it. I created another VM, did a simple Windows install, installed utorrent and the web interface. Now I can use this VM right from my workstation without ever logging in to it.

Ubuntu Linux

My next install was to be my first Linux VM. I have played with Linux many times but was never really comfortable doing complex things with it. I installed a Ubuntu Server 7.10 VM and thought I would spend some time playing around with Linux. Installing Linux with nothing to do on it didn’t provide for much of a learning opportunity so I started looking for an application to install. I decided I wanted my own mail system and make it usable via my Domain thewatsonfamily.ca and have mail accounts for the whole family.