It was a toss up between a 64bit Ubuntu Server (8.04) and a 64bit CentOS Server (5.1). I couldn’t decide between the two, except for the fact that more people have installed VMWare server on CentOS than Ubuntu. And most of those people have been successful. Yay!

The server is a Dell PowerEdge 2850, 2X 3.0GHz Intel Xeon Processors (800FSB), 12GB RAM, 6X 300GB SCSI HD in RAID10 (1+0). It’s a beast. Why didn’t I go with a 32 bit OS? Because of the 2 to 4GB limitations imposed upon single processes. Take MySQL for example:
64Bit OS MySQL will use up as much RAM as you have (actually it uses up roughly 8 out of 12GB in another server)
32Bit OS MySQL will use up to 2GB RAM in the same spec server.

So I want to use VMWare to it’s full potential.
Install CentOS with most of the defaults. I didn’t choose to install support for virtualization.

First thing is first: UPDATE your server. yum update
Next we have to install GCC. yum install gcc
Then install the developer kernel yum install kernel-devel
Reboot your system. This will make the new kernel active.
Download VMWare Server from vmware.com
tar xvfz vmware*.tar.gz
cd vmware
/etc/init.d/xinetd start
./vmware_install.pl

If you ever update the kernel you will need to run the vmware configuration again /usr/bin/vmware_config.pl

Getting Samba to work was a whole different matter. Issues… Issues… Issues.

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2.0.0 is the same, but I made the mistake of installing the xen kernel on the development machine. VMWare will not work with the xen kernel – you will get an error:
You cannot install VMware Server on a system running a xen kernel

So then you must:

yum install kernel
yum remove xen kernel-xen
nano /boot/grub/grub.conf

and then make sure that in the grub.conf menu that it’s trying to load the kernel and not the xen kernel. It probably does this automatically, but a few seconds here fixes issues down the road.