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Virtual Server will remain free after the Beta period.

Yes, the time keeping issue is annoying, but it is not an unknown issue. See this whitepaper: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_timekeeping.pdf

robert

The free VMware Server represents the upgrade path for all GSX Server customers. Once VMware Server is generally available, which is currently planned for Q2 2006, it will replace GSX Server as VMware's hosted server virtualization offering. At that time, VMware will also start offering Support and Subscription services for VMware Server for purchase.

It's not OSS. Check out Diane Green's Blog.

We're talking about virtual server software, not virtual workstation software.

VMWare Server beta is available for free download here. The company has stated that there will be a free version of the VMWare Server once it is ready for release.

So, what is it that VMware are supposed to be giving away for free? Only their virtual machine disk format, as far as I can see.

Then look harder.

They are giving away the GSX server product as well. Download the free beta version now. Not to mention the player software is already free.

The good thing about it is it can be hosted on Linux as well as on Windows.

VMWare has been giving away their product for a while now. MS is late to the game.

I thought so too, but it also seems that VMWare started the price war when they started giving away VMWare Player.

VMWare Player allows one to "play" a preconfigured virtual machine. Of course, any monkey with a text editor can edit the config file, but MS Virtual Server is more like VMWare Workstation or GSX server, AFAICT.

Go home and stop acting like a ho!

You got served!

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

For a company that sells a product with bullet point after bulletpoint on their capacity, expandability, robustness etc, try going to their forums at

http://www.vmware.com/community/ or http://www.vmware.com/community/forum.jspa?forumID =219

These sites run like a dog, even though they presumably have access to all the latest high tech VMWare stuff, and the funds to support the highest performance forum software. Not very inspiring.

For a company that sells a product with bullet point after bulletpoint on their capacity, expandability, robustness etc, try going to their forums at

http://www.vmware.com/community/ or http://www.vmware.com/community/forum.jspa?forumID =219

These sites run like a dog, even though they presumably have access to all the latest high tech VMWare stuff, and the funds to support the highest performance forum software. Not very inspiring.

So, are you a paid Microsoft toady, a Microsoft toady-at-large, or just an idiot?

It's the "supporting Linux" part that gives me the giggles. Believe anything out of a Microsoft mouth on the subject of Linux? The giggles are getting uncontrollable.

They may not be in trouble, but they're definitely having to do things they'd very much rather not do.

The URL for VMware Importer beta is wrong: It should be: http://www.vmware.com/products/beta/vmimporter/

The main factor for Check Point's acquisition was for the RNA technology and the way that the rest of SourceFire's products fit into a centralized management architecture (like Check Point's). Check Point's firewalls have been doing IPS/IDS firewalling for some time. Now combine the existing technology with SourceFire's passive IDS approach and you have quite an interesting technology. Check Point is constantly pushing the envelope and it would have been exciting to see what this would have brought.

As far as all the "US gov't doesn't use Check Point" consider this: one of Check Point's largest customers is the U.S. Army. So we can pretty much put that to rest.

Let's put another one to rest: this whole "Check Point sucks because its all closed source and they make money" is tiring. While yes Check Point's security applications are closed source, the development platform for all the apps is Linux. Check Point's own hardened Linux version SecurePlatform is available at no extra cost, is supported without extra cost and is the preferred platform. Download a version and see for yourself http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/. You'll see that Check Point makes extensive use of OSS, and even contributes back to the community from what I hear.

Check Point is a strong advocate for Open Source where it makes sense, and I don't think they need to apologize for being profitable when US based companies like Cisco and Microsoft make billions off the crap they have slopped together.

This whole Israeli "back door" thing is ridiculous, and stings of anti-semetic conspiracy. Israel has consistently been the US's most staunch ally (when allowed). What possible benefit would Israel or Check Point gain by allowing a backdoor to be widely distributed throughout the world? Think about it, Check Point has been in business for 13+ years, and has hundreds of thousands of Internet perimeter firewalls out there in operation. Don't you think that if there was a deliberate back door that it would have been found by now. Yeah those crazy Jews are out for world domination again. Ridiculous.

It is no secret that Check Point is run by mad scientists who make great product, but don't have a clue when it comes to running a business (well maybe just the bribing part). Could it be that Check Point maybe didn't grease Washington the way it should have? Could it be that Sam Nunn being on the board of directors for direct competitor of Sourcefire and Check Point's might have had something to do with this? Could it be that market powerhouses like Cisco who spend more money on marketing the mythical "self-defending network" than actually fixing their sh!t helped put a stop to this?

Follow the money. It was big businees and big Bush that killed this deal. And yes Check Point is a $Billion+ company so I'm sure they will survive (sniff sniff), but how does this play into the mythical "global free market" we keep hearng about? Is protecting stagnant companies like ISS and Cisco what is really best for the security market and the rest of us?

VMWare Server is free now, too! And it runs fine on my desktop here at work (P4 3.0Ghz) so I'd say it should be fine to run on a MBP once it becomes available for OSX. No need to get an expensive VMWare Workstation license.

http://www.vmware.com/products/server/

Besides, VMWare is not free, so you have to pay for a MS Windows license, AND for a VMWare license. Talk about double costs. Dual booting is cheaper then.

VMWare player is free. Granted, you have to have to create the images somehow, but there ways to do this without VMWare Workstation.

Dual-boot never worked for me. I simply don't want to reboot my Linux box, it stays on 24/7. I had to go with having two machines and KVM until I started using VMWare.

You currently can't run Windows under Xen as Xen requires the OS to be modified to run under it. Until the new CPUs with virtualization are out you can't use Xen to run Windows.

Right now, though, there is a good free (beer) alternative: VMWare Player. I've been using it with a Win2k guest and it works great. A bit sluggish on Athlon XP's (2500+) and lower, but it feels almost native on an Athlon 64 (3200+).

To create a disk, install qemu and use the following command to create the disk:

qemu-img create -f vmdk disk.vmdk 15G

To create your *.vmx file use VM Builder (it's a webapp).

Open the VMX file in VMWare Player and install Windows normally.

To install VMware Tools, just download an old version (tar.gz, not the rpm) of the Workstation or the betas of the Server. There is a "windows.iso" file in the archive that has everything you need.

Well, 3D acceleration under VMware is on the way, according to
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_vidsound_ d3d.html

It's in experimental stage, but looks promising.
The following link tells how to enable it for a given guest O.S.:
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_vidsound_ d3d_enabling_vm.html

Well, 3D acceleration under VMware is on the way, according to
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_vidsound_ d3d.html

It's in experimental stage, but looks promising.
The following link tells how to enable it for a given guest O.S.:
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_vidsound_ d3d_enabling_vm.html

I sincerely hope this does not affect the course of the distro, and that it continues to remain as user-friendly and true to it's founding values, but I'm beginning to think Ubuntu has replaced Mandrake/riva as the No 1 user-friendly distro.

When I moved from Slackware to Mandrake, it was great, but Mandrake/Mandriva have not really kept up, IMHO.

No, what VMWare does is not emulation. For an example of how emulation works, have a look at Bochs.

...Amit Singh from IBM and kernelthread.com (slashdotted 16 times for excellent technical articles on various bits of internals of Apple hardware and Mac OS X) has his own legacy boot solution as well. From a rejected submission:

It appears that Amit Singh of IBM Almaden Research Center, of kernelthread.com and author of Mac OS X Internals, has devised a method to allow legacy, or BIOS-based, booting on Intel-based Macs, which they're calling "BAMBIOS". This means operating systems that currently only support legacy booting, such as many Linux distributions that don't yet support EFI, or things like Windows XP and the forthcoming Windows Vista (the 32-bit version of which will lack EFI support), will now be able to run on Intel-based Macs without modification (and completely legally). There is also another solution from "narf2006", described here and shown in this flickr set of photos. narf2006's solution is awaiting verification by Colin for the $12,000 pot. Time to get that MacBook Pro you've been waiting on for the best of both worlds, everyone...

So even if narf2006's solution isn't real, Amit's solution most certainly is, since he has a great deal of credibility. One way or another, we'll all be able to boot Windows directly on our Intel-based Macs.

This will be great news for people interested in Windows gaming on an Intel-based Mac (who really need the direct video access) and/or people who just want to do it NOW; however, a virtualization solution running under Mac OS X, such as VMware or Parallels, will be the real holy grail for most users. Most people don't want/need/care about the highest graphics and I/O performance; just the ability to run Windows side-by-side with Mac OS X at a speed that is more than usable, and to also have some capability to seamlessly share things like clipboards and files between the environments (as a nice VM environment would most certainly do). Not to mention not having to reboot.

In any case, even dual booting will be a welcome capability. It remains to be seen how convoluted the process is...

Also, I just spoke with Colin Nederkoorn (the guy running the contest) moments ago, and narf2006's solution has NOT been submitted to him yet. He said that narf2006 said he's "cleaning it up" and will be submitting it "later this week". So, no one, including Colin, has actually seen this solution working yet. Also, he apparently hasn't been in communication with Amit on the BAMBIOS solution as yet...

Get a copy of Suse. Either OpenSuse http://en.opensuse.org/Released_Version#HTTP_or_FT P currently v10.0, v10.1 due end of April, 10.2 due end of year. Or buy Novell Suse professional with a support contract (s/b under $100 for the box, not sure of the support pricing). The purchased version has additional non-GPL content, like java, integrated. See http://www.thejemreport.com/mambo/content/view/178 /42/ for how to add the missing bits.
The install will recognise your existing Windoze partitions and will walk you through upgrading to a dual boot and the linux side has read-only access to the your NTFS partitions. Very Oeei-GUI interface, very little command line savvy needed. There is a LiveCD you can just boot to check it out. The "eval" DVD is the actual install.
On top of that VMware will be releasing a free VMserver so you can run your legacy Windoze inside the linux. Alternatively, if you are impatient or want a linux other than suse, you can download one of the free VMware appliances http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/ and run it in your Windoze environment
HTH

Well, a subset of DirectX 8. Work is progressing though, and it probably won't be long before it supports all of DX9.

Read info here.

So, back to the VMWare thing, yes I suppose you could hack a cluster of ESX servers up to do this.

Or, you could even call it VMotion and ship it three years ago. Hmm...

What exactly does this do that VMWare doesn't already do, and do better?

4. Virtual PBX to simulate phones and modems (modified asterisk?)

et voila: http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/community.ht ml#voip

Workstation 5.5 has a similar feature. If you make a "team" of machines you can assign the network speed between them. It has choices such as Modem (56 Kpbs), T1 (1.5 Mbps), to unlimited. You can also assign % of packet loss.

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/ws_team_lan seg_rename.html

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/img/w_tset_ lset.png

Workstation 5.5 has a similar feature. If you make a "team" of machines you can assign the network speed between them. It has choices such as Modem (56 Kpbs), T1 (1.5 Mbps), to unlimited. You can also assign % of packet loss.

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/ws_team_lan seg_rename.html

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/img/w_tset_ lset.png

A Virtual Appliance is just like a regular "appliance", except it's in a virtual machine instead of in a physical machine. Kind of like if you took a regular computing appliance and did a P2V on it.

It turns out that this is all explained pretty clearly in the FAQ:

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/challenge/fa q.html

A Virtual Appliance is just like a regular "appliance", except it's in a virtual machine instead of in a physical machine. Kind of like if you took a regular computing appliance and did a P2V on it.

It turns out that this is all explained pretty clearly in the FAQ:

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/challenge/fa q.html

K-12Linux Project

k12ltsp.org: Linux is free in terms of cost and in terms of development because it's based on Open Source software. We are free to adapt the work of others for use in our schools. This kind of freedom produces better software and makes Linux the right choice for schools and agencies concerned with the ethical use of public funds.

Most people who use Windows don't see past their nose when it comes to their computing needs. Look at the long term and where do you want your school in 5 years. Linux and Open Source IS keeping up and the software is readily available and with a little digging, your systems can be VERY compatible in a Microsoft world.

Me: When I am forced to use MS-Windows, I run it in VMplayer http://www.vmware.com/vmplayer. It is free. It is the best at running Microsoft software, especially ActiveX and DirectSound and a number of other gotches that cause other emulators to hiccup. You can even run it full screen and think you are on a Windows box. But having Linux run on your hardware will make it easier for anyone to manage. Go buy a copy of Mandriva 2006 at http://www.linuxcentral.com.

Also, I am running virus free with Linux for the past 8 years without the use of anti-virus software. To me, Linux IS the anti-virus software. But if you really think you need it, Linux has an external package available to do that for you. And if you get a virus on Windows running in VMplayer, simply reload the virtual drive image. No hassle!

Besides, there is just too much overhead to do this kind of thing in the VM at the driver level. They could theoretically create their own DirectX implementation that worked with the hosts drivers, but this seems like a LOT of work for a small gain.

Actually, VMware 5.0 has some experimental support for 3D acceleration through the host's drivers: http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_vidsound_ d3d.html

The documentation states you have to be a full time student.

Just so we're clear, the rules for the Ultimate Virtual Application Challenge indicate:

WHO CAN ENTER

To participate in the Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge (the "Challenge"), you must be at least 18 years old. The Challenge is open to individuals or teams of up to 10 people (the "Participant"), but not to corporate entries. By participating in the Challenge, Participants agree to be bound by these rules and to all decisions of VMware, which are final, binding and conclusive in all matters. To keep the Challenge legal and fair, we need to prohibit certain participants, see below.

.
.
.

PROHIBITED PARTICIPANTS

We want a fair and legal Challenge! Full and part-time employees of VMware as well as those who are performing internships during the Challenge duration and those involved in the production (including prize suppliers), implementation and distribution of this Challenge and their advertising or promotion agencies, parent companies, service providers, agents, officers, subsidiaries or affiliates, or any other persons or entities directly associated with the Challenge and members of the immediate families and/or persons living in the same household as such persons, are ineligible to enter the Challenge. Prizes will not be awarded to residents of Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, or Syria.

Freaked my shit out when the parent said it's only open to students, and moderators should probably fact check a little better before slapping an Informative on something. My two cents.

The bottom line is that you don't have to be a student, you can't work for VMWare, and you can't be a rat bastard commie terrorist. I'll bet they write shitty code anyway. The terrorists that is.

Ok, color me stupid but I wasn't really sure what a virtual appliance was.

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/challenge/fa q.html

Basically a network appliance runing under a virtual machine.

From the challenge rules:
Participant warrants that their entry will not contain any (a) materials that are pornographic, obscene,...

With VMWare offering the Server product for free (after competition from Microsoft), I am all for consolidation of hardware. My plan is to get a dual quad-core processor (when they come out in a year or two) machine with 4 Gig of RAM and run the virtual server on it to run all the OS's I run on the multiple machines. Saving of space and power....

and here: http://www.vmware.com/products/server/ (it is in Beta but works great and release version will be free as well)

I am very sure Vista(tm) can be run under a Virtual Machine, just like XP or 98 (which runs smoothest in Virtual PC (vmware is another example). I am also very convinced os X can be running under such Virtual Machine. Everything is possible with emulation, only, you've got to pay a small price, a price of performance...

This emulator has to translate a lot of things like memory, cpu, disks, mouse, keyboard, com ports, network card, usb devices (plug 'n pray), printer and low system (bios) calls to the underlying OS which takes a lot of CPU power and memory usage.

If this would be still running that fast on that nice mactel; I do not know...

I am very sure a virtual machine will run os X on PC and Vista on the mactel platform; only the task to run it natively without emulating too much is a pain ful cruisade (sometimes)...

oOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO oOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO

Life is like a box of chocolates, You never know what you gonna get! right?

As there is a lot more to use of a human brain than currently used by the majorty; the cpu is also not used as it should be used and in most cases even overused; most stuff is programmed (very) bloated; like Windows itself, like Vista be very good in the beginning, slow (& more bloated) in the middle and bad in the end (ready to reinstall); unless you very carefully pick your applications and don't change too much than needed upgrades (like with linux: when it's running, keep it running!)

>>> ... When I started programming I had to be carefully get everything on a 360k floppy, program and data files together. If I wanted a OS I'd have to swap floppies or add a B: drive. The 720k floppy's where just coming out so I was saving for a 2x size floppy drive. The next upgrade was a 20mb drive ...

>>> ... The PC evolution has exploded in all kinds of directions; as well upwards in technology and prices as downwards in quality and programming; just like all consumer devices these times...

>>> ... I sincerely hope the same does not happen with the universal binaries and os X; I just started to work with it, after +15yrs of working with PC, grew up with OS2 v2+ and warp, DOS, GEM, cp/m, Windows v2+, Windows v3+ and trumpet netsock which was a emulator(?), ... I have finally found something which is not such a burden to maintain that hard and which just works: a Powerbook 15" with os X!

>>> With Windows I learned to not to go strange with your os;

- Get rid of Internet explorer *immediately*! get Firefox or any alternative before your pc crawls ...
- if you got a good graphics * editor or messenger(tm) client ; stay with it and don't install 20 others to "try";
- Get a good Virusscanner, a free one like AVG or payware like F-secure Antivirus.
- If you want to get a good program you got to look at the size too, a smaller footprint can mean a smaller utilisation of memory and system usage; for a virusscanner or anti spyware utility this can be very vital!
- I repaired lots of them pc's's and it's all because of these virus/spyware/strange-installed things!
- which comes to : be sure to know what you install, verify the source a/o file (bbs 2400 baud world was hard sometimes!)
- Get rid of Outlook and Messenger, go to Trillian or alike
- Do not open files

Yes, you're absolutely correct. My mistake. There's more info at the GSX page.

As an aside... Last week, VMware made available a beta of VMware Server. I gather it's based on the old ESX product. I've been testing it since Thursday with excellent results!

If you purchased GSX recently (after Dec. 1 2005) like I did, below is a link to the GSX Server Refund Program. The refund does not cover taxes, media kits or support subscription. You will need to complete the form and snail mail it with original receipts to the address listed on the form. http://www.vmware.com/pdf/gsx_refund.pdf

Hi Theres, After having rolled out a 60+ CPU Production VMWARE-ESX implementation for my organisation, I can elaborate. VMWARE are currently pushing the virtualization much further than any other vendor, open source or commercial. When you buy into VMWARE (yes point#1, it ain't free) you are buying into a very scalable and open environment with good compatibility of guest operating systems. Point #2, The fact that we can have multiple physical servers in our Virtual Center farm accessing shared storage means that we care less about the hardware and more about the resources. Using the shared storage model (which is fundamental to VMWARE Virtual Center/ESX environments) we can very quickly and easily transport our virtual machines around. Point #3, Vmotion is the killer feature for ESX. We can also change physical hosts on-the-fly without downtime of the virtual machine. We have moved many VMs with hundreds of connected users who don't even notice. This makes maintenance of the underlying virtualization layer tranparent to the virtual machines. (the utilities). Point #4, With Virtual Center we can very quickly provision new virtual machines from our library of ready mades, which fully integrates with industry standard post installation customization wizards. (like Microsoft Sysprep). This has made us more agile as a business, as we are more quickly able to respond to new business ICT requirements. This is our eggshell utility model. When the future versions of Virtual Center arrive, they'll give us resource pooling, dynamic failover and resource scheduling, and greater overall control over resources. What VMWARE-ESX doesn't at the moment offer in terms of paravirtualization, may be superceded by on-chip virtualization such as Intel-VT and AMD Pacifica. VMWARE advocate? Maybe, but I'm remaining open minded to new technologies but quietly aware that for the time being, they won't integrate with VMWARE. Also for now our consolidation efforts are in the windows and unix small systems area. We haven't had the needs to warrant a major project virtualizing all of our Linux, or all of our Solaris. The best bit, ESX saves our team countless hours supporting hundreds of vms. Maybe one day the open standards will evolve to the point where other products will plugin to each other. Given that VMWARE are pushing the industry ahead with open virtualization standards. VMWARE Standards & Hypercall Interface http://www.vmware.com/standards/ http://www.vmware.com/communitysource/faqs.html

Hi Theres, After having rolled out a 60+ CPU Production VMWARE-ESX implementation for my organisation, I can elaborate. VMWARE are currently pushing the virtualization much further than any other vendor, open source or commercial. When you buy into VMWARE (yes point#1, it ain't free) you are buying into a very scalable and open environment with good compatibility of guest operating systems. Point #2, The fact that we can have multiple physical servers in our Virtual Center farm accessing shared storage means that we care less about the hardware and more about the resources. Using the shared storage model (which is fundamental to VMWARE Virtual Center/ESX environments) we can very quickly and easily transport our virtual machines around. Point #3, Vmotion is the killer feature for ESX. We can also change physical hosts on-the-fly without downtime of the virtual machine. We have moved many VMs with hundreds of connected users who don't even notice. This makes maintenance of the underlying virtualization layer tranparent to the virtual machines. (the utilities). Point #4, With Virtual Center we can very quickly provision new virtual machines from our library of ready mades, which fully integrates with industry standard post installation customization wizards. (like Microsoft Sysprep). This has made us more agile as a business, as we are more quickly able to respond to new business ICT requirements. This is our eggshell utility model. When the future versions of Virtual Center arrive, they'll give us resource pooling, dynamic failover and resource scheduling, and greater overall control over resources. What VMWARE-ESX doesn't at the moment offer in terms of paravirtualization, may be superceded by on-chip virtualization such as Intel-VT and AMD Pacifica. VMWARE advocate? Maybe, but I'm remaining open minded to new technologies but quietly aware that for the time being, they won't integrate with VMWARE. Also for now our consolidation efforts are in the windows and unix small systems area. We haven't had the needs to warrant a major project virtualizing all of our Linux, or all of our Solaris. The best bit, ESX saves our team countless hours supporting hundreds of vms. Maybe one day the open standards will evolve to the point where other products will plugin to each other. Given that VMWARE are pushing the industry ahead with open virtualization standards. VMWARE Standards & Hypercall Interface http://www.vmware.com/standards/ http://www.vmware.com/communitysource/faqs.html

Would this VMWare browser appliance be overkill?

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/vm/browserapp.html

It claims to be free.

Discuss, discuss.

13. Does ESX Server Run on Linux? On Windows?
ESX Server runs natively on server hardware, without a host operating system. The ESX Server virtualization layer is a highly compact and efficient operating system kernel entirely developed by VMware for optimum virtual machine performance. This allows ESX Server to fully manage the hardware resources and provide the highest levels of security and performance isolation. ESX Server also incorporates a service console based on a Linux 2.4 kernel that is used to boot the ESX Server virtualization layer. It also runs ESX Server administration applications.

VMWare ESX Server FAQs

Recent versions of Workstation are more than a GSX subset. They include features that are targeted specifically at developers and desktop users, that tend to be less useful for servers. E.g., workstation offers "teams" of associated VMs that power on together, and share a virtual private network connection, for software developers. It has a richer set of lightweight-cloning operations, which makes it more tractable to deploy applications inside VMs. And so on...

Not claiming we're always going to sell workstation forever and ever, just saying it's not necessarily an absurdity to go on charging for it. Not speaking for my employer, etc.

"GSX does all you need. So why if GSX is free would you need workstation?"

Host Operating Systems
Runs on Microsoft Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server; Windows Server 2003, Web, Standard, Enterprise and x64 Editions, and Linux server host OSes

Host Operating Systems
Windows 2000 Professional and Server, Windows XP (32- and 64-bit), Windows Server 2003 (32- and 64-bit)
Popular 32-bit Linux distributions from Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu and Mandrake; select RHEL and SLES 64-bit

"GSX does all you need. So why if GSX is free would you need workstation?"

Host Operating Systems
Runs on Microsoft Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server; Windows Server 2003, Web, Standard, Enterprise and x64 Editions, and Linux server host OSes

Host Operating Systems
Windows 2000 Professional and Server, Windows XP (32- and 64-bit), Windows Server 2003 (32- and 64-bit)
Popular 32-bit Linux distributions from Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu and Mandrake; select RHEL and SLES 64-bit

"This is not a troll comment but can it run on a cluster?"

No it's not troll, but it's totally uniformed. Currently SMP (multiprocessor/multithreaded) VMware is only supported on ESX server as an addon. As ESX runs on bare hardware (it's GSX who runs as a Linux application), there is currently no support for "virtual multiple CPUs in Linux". (Xen does this, but it's not the issue now).

Additionally OpenMOSIX (which comes with ClusterKnoppix - I guess you meant this by "those Live CDs"), does not to "SMP like" processing. Instead it combines the processes in a "global system view" state. (Too much technical details here, but a multiple threads are not migrated -- see HOWTO).

Moreover, it would be slow because of obvious issues -- as in network based access to disk and shared memory!

Finally multiple GSX servers managed from a single point is already possible with VMWare virtual center (google this yourselves is left for an exercise).

Sorry, but your suggestion will not work (at least under current circumstances).