VMware Server is totally free. All you need is just to register your name and address to obtain a number of serial numbers.

You may get up to 100 serial numbers at a time. In VMware, there are 3 network types: bridge, nat, and host-only:

Bridge is the most powerful one but you need an extra IP address.

If you don’t have one, you might be interesting in nat or host-only. Nat seems to be better to keep your guest OS up-to-date and connected to the internet.  Nat means you can’t connect to the guest OS directly from internet so you can’t run it as a server.

Anyway, it is possible to forward port to the guest OS behind NAT

Usually, the nat configuration will be stored in a file named nat.conf located in each VMware’s network device.

For example, my host OS has vmnet8 as a nat device so there is a nat.conf as follow:

/etc/vmware/vmnet8/nat/nat.conf

Port forwarding is in section incomingtcp and incomingudp.

For example, I would like to ssh to the guest OS on port 22 through port 2222 on the host OS.

[incomingtcp]
2222 = 172.168.254.100:22

After that I have to restart VMware’s network services as below.

/usr/lib/vmware/net-services.sh restart

So now I can ssh to the guest OS as follow:

ssh -p 222 mydomain.com

VMware Server can create, edit, and play virtual machines. It uses a client-server model, allowing remote access to virtual machines, at the cost of some graphical performance (and 3D support). In addition to the ability to run virtual machines created by other VMware products, it can also run virtual machines created by Microsoft Virtual PC.

1. Install required packages

apt-get install psmisc make gcc gcc-4.1 linux-headers-$(uname -r)

2. Download VMware server

Register at vmware.com, download the latest VMware server binary and upload to your server.