Overview

In a classroom environment, there is a need to run 10-15 VMs based around Windows 2000. Can the freeware VMware Server handle this many concurrent VMs?

Investigation

For a Languages classroom we need to run multiple VMs. We could give each student an 8Gb USB pen drive and install VMware Player on the classroom PCs, but they would lose it. The classroom PCs are well-secured and a number of software packages just will not run in a multi-user environment, and require one VM per student. VMware ESX is under investigation but for various reasons, political, internal change, finance etc, it will not be possible to have this online in time for the classes.

VMware - Limitations

  • This article reports VMware Workstation running 21 XP-based VMs concurrently on a beefy server, so it should be possible.
  • This article reports that running 15-16 VMs on Windows Server 2003 host causes problems.
  • This excellent article advises using Centos as the host OS and running 4-6 Vms per physical CPU core.

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