I’ve recently been playing around with the VMWare Server, which the folks at VMWare recently made released as a free download. First up, it rocks, but thats a given; VMWare has always been a solid product (and yes, I actually do have an honest to goodness legal license for VMWare Workstation. Alas, I doubt I’ll ever use it again now.) That being said, I encountered a few problems.

1. On my laptop I recieved messages about failure to create COM objects (eg “Unable to create VmdbCore object: Class not registered”). Trying to register the appropriate DLL, vmdbCOM.dll, by hand only resulted in failure and an error code of 0×8007007e. After much searching the net, I found that I needed to register atl.dll. Here’s what I did:
   1. regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\atl.dll
   2. regsvr32 “c:\Program Files\VMWare\VMWare Server\vmdbCOM.dll”
   3. regsvr32 “c:\Program Files\VMWare\VMWare Server\vmappsdk.dll”

   After that, it worked wonderfully.

2. If you want to use the web interface, you’ll need to have IIS installed before you install VMWare Server. If you’re like me and only realize that you don’t actually have IIS installed until after you install VMWare, no worries. Simply install IIS and then use the Repair functionality of the VMWare Server installer.
3. Using IIS 5 on Windows XP Pro, I was informed that the VMWare IIS site was setup correctly, but was unable to start. The solution I found was to stop the Default Site using the IIS manager snap-in and then start the VMWare Management Interface site. My guess is that IIS on XP is crippled to allow only one site running at a time.
4. To access VMWare Server from another machine you’ll need (by default) the following ports open on the server system:
   1. 8222 (For the VMWare Management Interface website)
   2. 8333 (For the SSL encrypted version of the VMWare Management Interface website)
   3. 902 (To connect with the VMWare Virtual Machine Console application)

Aside from those issues, it’s been wonderfully smooth sailing thus far.