It was foolish and lazy of me to just accept the defaults and not pay attention during the install.

I don’t see why running 10 VMs would be any easier via a web based interface. I found it to be quite irritating.

I also do not agree that there is a necessity to exchange installation simplicity for product robustness / tweakability. There is nothing wrong with sensible defaults.

This was written because I had a shitty experience with a product which I have had delightful experiences in the past. I did not have to do research or read long guides to install it before.

There is your problem. If you would have read those “questions” that were asked you would have noticed one of them is, “would you like to add a administrator account” [yes/no]

And yes, by default the root account is used, but in the case of ubuntu there isn’t a “root” account readily available without other modifications to your OS. Ubuntu just does it differently. There are also patches you must install to the vmware-config.pl script in order to to make those kernel modules compile correctly, vsock to be exact. Once again, just Ubuntu doing things differently.

As far as the “blank page” its not actually blank. Either your popup software is blocking the content or secondly, you are seeing your browser’s notification page warning you of a self signed SSL Certificate that it cannot verify. You simply need to add an exception to tell your browser to accept the SSL Cert.

I’m not trying to be a smart ass here, but your problems are your own fault for simply not knowing and understanding what it is you are trying to achieve. “Server” software is not and should not be simple ‘one click installs’. VMware Server is this way because of how robust it is. There are many many ways to tweak it to perform the way you want it to for a specific production environment.

I will agree that the web based interface is a bit clunky. But when you have 10+ VM’s running off of one server, you will find it comes in extremely handy when trying to manage several VM’s.

I did not want player, i wanted server.

Server didn’t always run via the browser, and it is not really a web service.

The player is an application that runs locally. Server runs as a web service. Player is much easier to set up, it doesn’t even need the command line, it has a GUI that steps you through the whole thing.

I’ve been using vmware for over 10 years. I’ve paid for the corporate versions when using for work and enjoyed the free version when they made it available a few years back.

Now it just blows. Where did my nice vmware UI go? Now I get a nasty login page with no idea what the login info is and I also get a couple nice error pages when I click on some of the other links the installer created.

They probably got bought by some crappy company or something. They were a stand up company for a very long time.

Another one bites the dust.

I am glad someone wrote a guide, but it still is emphasizing that it is considerably harder to install than the operating system itself.

Also I am still pretty against the web interface. There is no reason for that shit.