Wed 9 May 2007
Today, I installed the Beta 3 of Windows Server Longhorn on the latest release candidate of VMware Workstation 6 (build 44426). Compared with the negative experiences I made with the beta versions of Vista and VMware Workstation, everything worked out smoothly. There are still two problems, though.
At the moment the VMware Workstation support of Longhorn is only experimental. So you should not expect all features to work properly. My biggest problem is the VMware mouse driver. Even without mouse pointer scheme and with disabled shadows, the mouse pointer is quite jerky if you run VMware Workstation in a Terminal Server session. Connecting by RDP to the guest system is not really a good solution. So if you know how to solve this issue, I would appreciate any hint.
Another problem I had is the shared folders feature. I am not able to map a network drive on the guest to a shared folder on the host. “\\.host\share” always results in “Windows cannot access…”. This VMware feature doesn’t work with Vista, too. However, someone commented here that he got it working. Anyway, since you can exchange files between host and guest using drag and drop, this is not a big problem.
Everything else is working smoothly so far. I installed the standard version and Server Core. I will continue testing Longhorn in the coming weeks and report about it here.
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Any thoughts on what the core version would be most useful for?
Hi, I am the person who previous got the share folder thing working.
I noticed you used “\\.host\share”
However, this is not what I used to access, but instead I use “\\.host\Shared Folders”, and right away, I can see a list of folders that I have mapped.
I hope this helps
Hi,
I was testing Longhorn on VMware Server 1.0.3 a few days ago and I had the same problem with the mouse pointer.
However I got it working much smoother by doing the following steps:
1) “Right-click->Properties” on desktop
2) Click on “Display Settings” (should be last link on the page)
3) Click on “Advanced Settings” button then go to the “Troubleshoot” tab.
4) Click on “Change settings” button. This might ask you for admin rights - if it does, accept.
5) Move the hardware acceleration slider all the way to the right to the “Full” setting.
6) Click “OK”, “OK” and “OK” buttons to close all the dialogs and to save settings.
7) A reboot might be required after this change.
These steps improved significantly the mouse pointer inside the VM, even through an RDP session to the Host (Windows 2003 Server).
Hopefully it helps you too with VMware Workstation on Vista…
Gianni.
Wow, thanks a lot to both of you. This saved my day.
Josh, I am currently testing Server Core and will blog about it soon. So stayed tuned.
Were you able to install an Ethernet driver for Longhorn under VMware? I’m running it on VMware Server and I cannot get it to install a driver…
I have installed a W2k3 server including the VMWare tools and updated to LH Beta 3 giving me the VMWare drivers.
Bill, I didn’t have a problem with the network device driver. However, I am using VMware Workstation 6.0.
I just installed it onto VMware Server and same - no network drivers…
Worked fine on my workstation in Virtual PC.
Anyone found a driver/workaround for it?
I’ve tried to change
Ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000″
And it works.
I had the same problems with the nic. I followed the steps for installing the os by switching to Vista, and installed vmware tools. Also tried adding the Ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000″ The way I got it to work, was by using Vista64 OS, which forces you to switch to e1000. Turned it on and worked like a charm. Only differenc is I’m using ESX 3.01 and Windows Server 2008 Evaluation Ed.