Earlier this week I talked about the ongoing advance of the VMware software through a range of different environments and how they compared to other solutions.

The VMware player software has been available for some time now, and it's been a hit. I am even considering producing some of my own VMware player packages that could be downloaded and used by VMware player users.

For me though the most useful product of VMware is their server offering. I run it on a server here, set up a number of different operating systems and then at any time I can log in to an environment and run an application or lookup a particular element. It certainly makes certain aspects of the job much easier. Within just a few minutes I can test an application within BSD, a number of Linux variants and Solaris without ever having to reboot, and for many, without having to do anything more than login.