While concluding my recent personal project, a trip down memory lane with both ESX 1.0 (along with installing all subsequent major ESX and ESXi releases) and VirtualCenter 1.0, I had received a TON of positive feedback on the nostalgia and the memories that these videos had brought back, including many VMware colleagues both current and past.
For many, including myself, it was also an opportunity to experience some of the very early releases of ESX and ESXi, especially with folks starting their VMware journey at different points in time and these videos are as much educational as they are historical.
With that said, I also had bunch of folks ask what about other early VMware Hypervisors such as VMware GSX Server, VMware Server and VMware Workstation? These early VMware Hypervisors also heavily influenced the careers of many within our VMware community and it got many folks started in their IT career, so I thought it would make sense to also include these in my trip down memory lane project ... so I guess I was not done, just yet! 😅
My own personal experience with some of these early VMware Hypervisor was only with VMware Server 1.0, but anything that pre-dates ~2006 was completely brand new territory for me. In fact, before embarking down this additional VMware history, I actually did not know that the very first product from VMware was literally called VMware!
For those intersted, I have also documented the configurations that I had used to install each of the VMware Hypervisors below.
VMware 1.0
- VM Compatibility: ESX/ESXi 8.0 and later (vHW20)
- GuestOS: Microsoft Windows 2000
- Operating System: Windows Server 2000 Standard
- vCPU: 1
- vMEM: 8GB
- vDISK: 32GB
- NIC Adapter: Flexible
- Storage Adapter: Bus Logic
VMware GSX Server 1.0
I had the most difficult time getting GSX Server 1.0 installed because most Linux distributions that I had tried could not load the default VMware modules, which meant that I needed to compile the module for specific Linux kernel which ranged from 2.4 to 2.6, but they all eventually lead to many more dependency and compilation issues. If it was not for this archive of the GSX Server documentation hosted on MIT, I probably would have given up much earlier.
After trying dozen of old Linux distributions that shipped with 2.2-2.6 kernels, I eventually came to find that Turbo Linux 6.0 had everything required to just work out of the box! In fact, this version had even shipped with earlier version of VMware 1.1.x (Build 364) for Linux, which of course had to be removed before I could install GSX Server.
I was also able to find an early beta release of GSX Server for Windows, which also installed without issues using Windows Server 2003 Web in case anyone was curious about the Windows version for GSX Server.
- VM Compatibility: ESX/ESXi 3.5 and later (vHW20)
- GuestOS: Other/Linux (32-bit)
- Operating System: TurboLinux 6.0
- vCPU: 1
- vMEM: 8GB
- vDISK: 8GB
- NIC Adapter: Flexible
- Storage Adapter: Bus Logic
VMware Server 1.0
- VM Compatibility: ESX/ESXi 8.0 and later (vHW20)
- GuestOS: Microsoft Windows 2003
- Operating System: Windows Server 2003 Web
- vCPU: 1
- vMEM: 8GB
- vDISK: 32GB
- NIC Adapter: Flexible
- Storage Adapter: Bus Logic
VMware Workstation 3.0
- VM Compatibility: ESX/ESXi 8.0 and later (vHW20)
- GuestOS: Microsoft Windows 2003
- Operating System: Windows Server 2003 Web
- vCPU: 1
- vMEM: 8GB
- vDISK: 32GB
- NIC Adapter: Flexible
- Storage Adapter: Bus Logic
Timothy Dressel says
GSX on Windows was my first VMware experience. That was transformational for my understanding of enterprise tech!
Marius Schäfer says
Nice!
How did it work without hardware virtualization support?
Michael Abmayer says
My first VMware experience was "VMware for Linux" Version 2.0.3 (build 799), December 2000. Host OS was SuSE Linux, Guest OS Windows 98 SE. It was incredible to see Windows running on top of Linux. Rule of thumb, speed felt like approx. 50% of a native installation, but I didn't benchmark thoroughly.