I decided to use the long weekend to break in VMWare Server RC2. As per the release notes, I uninstalled GSX Server and rebooted prior to installing VMWare Server.

Impressively, it didn’t require another reboot, and appears to be fully compatible with my old VMs.

According to the admin guide, in order to take advantage of the new features in Server, you have to upgrade the virtual machines. This changes some of the virtual hardware, so may have some implications for the behavior of the guest OSs.

I’ll start with carlotta, the W2k3 box I don’t use that often. I did so, and was exhorted to upgrade the VMWare tools.

…

It seemed to work fine. Now the FreeBSD and OpenBSD boxes…

One problem is that the VMWare Console port seems to have changed back to its old default, 900-something. I had previously changed it to tcp/8080, since the fuckwits at CI Host run a facist firewall in front of my box that only passes a few known ports. I don’t remember how I changed it last time, but I can’t find it in the VMWare Server GUI so it’s probably a registry setting.

Sure enough, page 81 of the admin guide has this to say:

To change the port number on a Windows host or client Add the following line to config.ini in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VMware Server: authd.port = where <portNumber> is the port number that all consoles connecting to virtual machines on this host must use.

So, I added authd.port = 8080 to the config.ini file and rebooted.

The upgrade went all, and all the VMs seem to be working normally. Too easy.