VMWare Progress

• Installed two of the 750GB drives into benfranklin. Need to come up with a partition layout. Maybe just one system per disk (one of which will be virtualized)? I think this is good enough for testing, so that's what I'll do.
• RHEL5 is installed, as well as the latest version of vmware server. The current (default) configuration seems to be invalid, asking to re-configure via /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl. Reconfiguring with the defaults makes no difference. It says it needs inted/xinetd, but neither is installed. Yum won't work without RHN, so we've gotta set that up.

VMWare Server

• Runs on any standard x86 hardware
• Supports 64-bit guest operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Solaris
• Supports two-processor Virtual SMP, enabling a single virtual machine to span multiple physical processors ("experimental")
• Runs on a wider variety of Linux and Windows host and guest operating systems than any server virtualization product on the market
• Captures entire state of a virtual machine and rolls back at any time with the click of a single button
• Installs like an application, with quick and easy, wizard-driven installation
• Quick and easy, wizard-driven virtual machine creation
• Supports Intel Virtualization Technology
• Protects investment with an easy upgrade path to VMware Infrastructure

Other docs

VMWare Converter

To turn a physical machine into a virtual one, use Converter, on Windows. We're slightly screwed for this part.

NOTE: Experimental support only is available for Linux-based physical to virtual machine conversions using the Vmware Converter BootCD (cold cloning) if the source physical machine has SCSI disks.

http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/faqs.html