I recently undertook the task of building a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server for hosting a wordpress site and a drupal site for comparison of the two CMSs . I have done this countless times and most are still running smoothely to this day. However, this time it was a little different... If our department decided one of these CMSs is a good fit for our public website, we would need a production LAMP server. And although I have built LAMP servers multiple times, I'd rather not have to build one so quickly right after the other.

My solution: VMware vSphere Hypervisor 5. A free virtual machine host operating system. Setting up VMware vSphere Hypervisor, a.k.a. ESXi, is very easy. I won't go into details but here are the steps for setting up a ESXi on a server

1. Register for your free license and download VMware vSphere Hypervisor(current version)
2. Burn it to a cd
3. Boot the server from the cd
4. Follow the prompts and install vSphere Hypervisor
5. Set password, and Configure network settings

see more here...

Once you have the server portion installed, download and install the vshpere client.

After vsphere client is installed you can configure your virtual machine.  Which includes setting options like where the virtual hard drive should be stored, how much RAM to allocate, etc.   I personally passed the physical DVD-Drive to my virtual machine and installed Ubuntu server like I normally would on a physical box, with the exception of using the vSphere client, like remote desktop.

Summary:

Using VMware Vsphere Hypervisor is a cheap way to get a virtual machine up and running in no time.  By cheap I mean free, and by easy I had this completed in a matter of hours, including the time it took to install Ubuntu server.

As always, thanks for reading.