VMWare Internet Connection Sharing appliance

Jeff Mancuso June 22nd, 2007

I admit, I have never quite understood the push behind these VMWare appliances. For me, they fall into the giant soup of enterprise products that I can’t imagine ever using. That being said, I’ve finally found one that is quite useful for me, the non-enterprise user.

Supposedly simple task: Share the wireless connection of my IBM Thinkpad with my MacBook Pro.

Windows Internet Connection Sharing [ICS] has proven super flakey and slow, not to mention its complete lack of advanced options. After 45 minutes of pain, I gave this VMWare appliance a shot. I set up one VMNet1 to run NAT and DHCP against the host and VMNet2 to bridge with the ethernet connection. Set the VM to boot when the Thinkpad powers up. 32 Meg memory footprint. Good to go.

It just works, and the performance is fantastic.

Awesome.

I’ll also use this post to give a shout out to the best-free-product-in-the-universe, VMWare GSX Server. It really is quite amazing. It has nearly all the power of VMWare Workstation, and has some extra cool features of its own. Did I mention it is completely free?

  • Todd

    Nitpick: The free edition of the product is actually called “VMware Server” — and while it is newer than the discontinued GSX product, it’s not exactly the same.

    Some minor features, that most people won’t miss, have been stripped out in the free version. This is likely to promote VMware Infrastructure, the new name of ESX Server, for enterprise use; and VMware Workstation (which is actually much more feature-rich, just not a “background VM” product) for interactive use.

    The most end-user noticeable feature missing in VMware Server is the lack of true graphics acceleration, so gaming and video playback inside VMware Server are generally non-starters. (Workstation is the product that still offers that feature.) Generally, however, VMware Server fits the needs of a large portion of virtualization end users and small organizations.

  • Jeff

    VMWare workstation doesn’t have true graphics acceleration either. I spend a greater portion of my day inside VMWare 6.0 workstation, and it’s support is certainly “experimental” at best. It looks like it has been upgraded to a high priority feature for them though, so I’d expect it to get better quickly.

    However, VMWare server offers the same quality virtualization and speed as the desktop product. Same tools, etc. It’s pretty much feature complete to workstation v5.0. Ver 6 offers some integrated debugging, playback of vm sessions, experimental 3d – but is more or less the same product.

    ESX Server is a completely different beast than VMWare server. It’s a directly on top of the metal solution and isn’t really comparable to ‘gsx’ server.

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    They stood at the counter, submissively completing who they thought would tear the sansation that weekend.

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