Introduction: Well, with a copy of VMware GSX Server, I am looking forward to learning its depths, and comparing these with Virtual PC. The benefits are that it permits you to run applications in a rock-solid separate window with their own operating system. So your company might migrate to Server 2003/Windows XP, while some of your legacy applications are only validated for Windows 2000 or even Windows NT 4!. The pocket universe created by GSX and similar offerings is that you may run an application in the operating system of your choosing. The benefits of this are many and clear, both for developers and for infrastructure folks. In my tests, I will be using VMware GSX Server Version 3.0.0, Build 7592, and installing on Windows Server 2003, Web Edition (version 5.2.3790, Service Pack 1), with a generous gig of RAM. First Problem: Challenges with VMWare GSX Server are not long in coming! Even during installation, problems proliferated. Fortunately, this took a single form: over a dozen spurious error messages. These are all identical, and identically unilluminating: “Internal Error 2816. SetupIUnitialization, ActionText, ActionText” These can be safely ignored, according to the VMware support site. Even so, it would have been nice not to have encountered spurious error messages. Fortunately, other users have experienced this problem as well, and their bitter troubleshooting saves us immense headaches. Thus the initial install is eventful but painless. Second Problem: The second problem occurred after the installation was complete. In the Start>Programs VMware>VMware GSX Server folder, there are three items: 1. Manage Virtual Networks 2. VMware GSX Server Console 3. VMware Virtual Machine Console The first one (Manage Virtual Networks) worked perfectly. But when I started either of the other two, I received an error message: Application failure. hr = 0x80040154: (null) This was not transparent, to say the least. But some googling and link-jumping finally yielded a solution: running regsvr32 on two of the program’s DLLs. From the command prompt, I ran the following commands: regsvr32 c:\program files\vmware\vmware GSX server\vmappsdk.dll And regsvr32 c:\program files\vmware\vmware GSX server\vmdbcom.dll After this, everything was working smoothly. More as I work with the application. But running into problems as odd as these so early is scarcely a confidence builder.