I will try to answer your questions one by one:
"What version of vmware would you recommend I purchase?"
A workstation license is what you need. It will allow you to run a virtual machine with the following operating systems to choose from:
Windows 3.x
Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows Me
Windows NT
Windows 2000 Professional
Windows XP (Home/Professional)
Windows 2000 Server (Standard/Advanced)
Windows 2003 server (web/standard/enterprise edition)
You can even run different distros of Linux, Novell Netware, MSDos and FreeBSD on it as well.
The other versions of VMware are optimized for server consolidation in a production environment. They are more expensive as well and you have no need for any of those for private use.
"Utlimately, what I want to focus my learing on at this point in time is; to be able to install w2k server and or w3k server, W2K professional, Xp Professoinal, exchange and SQL. Would all of these programs be able to be installed on one farily powerful machine?"
Yes, they would. You can install and run as many virtual machines simultanously as your hardware can manage. VMware works with virtual disks. (Files that will occupy N gigabytes of your physical harddisk to use for that specific virtual machine). So lets say you install a windows 2000 advanced server. Then you for instance will assign a 4 gb file on your physical disk for this machine to use. Your virtual machine will "see" only those 4 gigabyte of disk, and treat it as it were a physical disk. Or you can for instance assign 3 such files to a virtual Windows 2003 server installation, so it has 3 "physical" harddrives and then configure a RAID solution. (Off course, you will not have *REAL* fault tolerance or anything, but this product is so smart that windows won´t see the difference between the "physical disks" (the files on your harddrive) and the real physical disk that is hosting those files.
So if you have a big disk (big enough for your daily stuff and in addition with enough free space to create N virtual disk files), a fairly powerful CPU and enough memory (You will need enough memory for your hosting operating system to run and in addition enough memory to run N virtual machines simultanously), you should be ready.
"do I have to purchase all of the mentioned software;"
No, you don´t need to. For learning purpouses, Microsoft has evaluation versions of most of its software. Visit the following link for more info:
A 30-day trial of the vmware product is also available from this link:
The price of the product itself is $189 USD.
I guess I sound like some kind of salesperson or something, but I am really amazed with this piece of software. It lets me experiment, install, reinstall, configure, delete, and fu"#¤& up everything without the need of N pc´s, cloning, multiboot scenarios and so on.
When it comes to certification what you need is a really good book and an environment to play/test your skills on. The best way to learn something
Please let me now if you wonder about anything else.
