VMware can run on a stock unraid kernel as it has been stated in this thread.  I have it running on unRAID 4.5.6 without any issues, but I have not tried it on 5.0 beta 1 yet.

 

There are 2 big problems with VMware as it stands today:

1. You must register and provide a unique serial number even though it is "free" software.  This prevents anyone from distributing packages they have built.  If anyone can find a way around this, it would be a huge benefit for the community.  I can see VMware being adopted by lots of people very quickly.

 

2.  Every time the kernel version changes in unRAID, the VMware packages must be recompiled to work with the new kernel.  This is the main reason a lot of people are still running unRAID 4.4 instead of 4.5.  Without a great deal of Linux experience it can be a very timely endeavor to upgrade to a newer unRAID version.  With the test setup I have it still takes almost 2 hours to prepare new packages every time the kernel changes.  If you are setting up from scratch, it can take an entire day.

 

I am looking into testing VMware ESXi so all of my VM's can run on the hardware instead of the software layer VMware Server offers.  Don't get me wrong, I like using VMware, but the system can be a bit sluggish when you're not running on a bare metal hypervisor.

 

Thanks. I temporarily gave up on VMware and tried VBox when I could not for the life of me get the PAM authentication to work. Tried about four different versions of PAM, as well as some config mods that were suggested on some slackware/VMware threads. As far as I could tell nobody needed any other modification other than installing the linux-pam package, no configuring files, etc. I've posted this in the other bigger VMware thread, hoping someone may have other suggestions.

 

I enjoy VBox's simplicity, but I'm finding that it's rather unstable. I'll frequently come back to a VM after letting it run a few hours to find that it's no longer accessible, the VBoxHeadless process is no longer running, etc. I'm running a swapfile and with my /opt and /tmp folders symlinked to a persistent drive. I'd still love to try VMware Server for comparison, if I could just log in to the web interface!

 

I've read that in recent versions Virtualbox's Linux implementations took a dive in stability.

Tim - I replied to you in the main VMware thread to keep this a bit cleaner.

 

On a side note - VMware ESXi 4.1 now supports USB passthrough!!!!  I am going to have to toss this on my backup system and see if I can get it working.

Thanks, I'll move back to the other thread.

 

Wish I had the proper hardware to run unRAID sitting on an ESXi server, if people seem to have this working.