VMware has announced a second generation of its free server virtualisation product with extended hardware and operating system support.

VMware Server 2.0 also benefits from a new web-based management interface and scalability enhancements and will be fully available by the middle of 2008. In the meantime, you can download and evaluate the software in beta format, just as we did for this review.

VMware Server 2.0 can be used by small businesses looking to both consolidate physical servers and host business desktops. It’s available in the same two formats as the previous version - for use on either Windows or Linux hosts and the hardware requirements are much the same as before. That means support for both 32-bit and 64-bit processors (Intel or AMD) including those with Intel-VT and AMD-V virtualisation extensions.

Unlike some other virtualisation tools, processors with virtualisation extensions are not an absolute prerequisite. However, they are needed if you want to take advantage of the support for 64-bit guest operating systems plus, of course, you’ll need 64-bit processors in the host server. A utility is also available to check that your processors meet these requirements.

Existing virtual machines can be hosted by the new server without any changes, on top of which support for a number of new guests has been added. Most notably Vista Business and Ultimate editions, Windows Server 2008 and RHEL 5.

Other enhancements include the ability to configure virtual machines with up to 8GB of Ram (up from 3.6GB in VMware Server 1.0) and up to 10 virtual network adapters. Two-way virtual SMP is also supported (as in the previous version) and you can have up to 64 virtual machines per host. The new server also now offers support for high speed USB2 devices.

A server operating system is required on the host system, which can be Windows 2000 onwards with support for Windows Server 2008 added in this release. Alternatively, you can host the software using Linux with support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 and the latest Novell Suse and Ubuntu distros now available.

Installation can take a while, especially on a Linux server, but the process is fairly straightforward and doesn’t require a huge amount of technical knowhow. Likewise, once installed, VMware server is fairly easy to get to grips with.

In VMware Server 1.0 a windows console was used to configure, manage and run virtual machines, with an optional web-based interface, which didn’t have as much functionality. In this release these are replaced by a single web-based interface (VI Web Access) from which you can do everything that was possible from the old server console. In addition, it’s possible to manage VMWare Server 2.0 hosts alongside those running ESX server using VMware Virtualcenter.

It took a while to get to grips with the VI Web Access, but all the tools to create and modify virtual machines, stop and start them, and so on, are there. A browser plug-in is needed to run the remote console and we did find it a bit sluggish in places. We also encountered a few issues starting the underlying services. However, problems such as these are to be expected in a beta release and should be ironed out by the time the product is fully released.

In the meantime VMware doesn’t recommend using Server 2.0 to host production systems, just for familiarisation and testing.