Today the first big problem of making my MS VPCs VMware virtual machines showed its ugly mug. VMware changed the machine’s MAC address, thus making the MAC-restricted EPiServer license invalid. I tried changing the MAC address to the old one in the .vmx-file, but it seems that VMware only supports addresses in a certain range. So now I have to order a new EPiServer license.

Apart from that, VMware Player today gave me my first blue screen on XP ever. Unless you count that one time that my laptop was next to a drum kit (don’t ask), and the drummer’s bass kicking vibrations caused the computer to blue out on me. Also I find it annoying that once you grab control of the mouse and keyboard in the virtual machine, you have to press Ctrl+Alt to return to the host system. In Virtual PC you don’t have to do that.

Apart from that, VMware is FAAAAST. Just saving the state and then recovering it is so smooth as compared to VPC.

Today I was toying around with Ubuntu 7.04 and tried to create a virtual machine via Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007. That didn’t go too well, the reasons being:

1. Graphics problems (VPC can’t handle 24-bit graphics, which is solved by installing it in safe mode)
2. The network didn’t work
3. The mouse didn’t work (possible solution)

I gave up and decided to go for VMware’s free virtualization software instead. First I downloaded VMware Server to install on my XP laptop. Not very stable, so I went on to install it on my Win 2k3 Virtual PC-machine. Just caused it to crash constantly. So I downloaded WMvare Player, which runs on client operating systems instead. And then I used these instructions to create a VMware machine without the VMware server. Just be sure to make the virtual hard drive bigger than 2 gigabytes and you’re good to go (I set it to 16 Gb) because if you don’t, the installation will freeze with no further explanation. Oh yes, I made that mistake.

I also used WMvare Player to run my vpc-machines with Win2k3. I’ve heard a lot about VMware being so much faster than Microsoft’s stuff, but I don’t know yet. Will try it for a while and see.