What you need to know prior to installation - from http://www.petri.co.il/virtual_install_vmware_server.htm - visit the site for screen shots.
VMware Server will only run on Intel machines. The host operating system can be Windows or Linux. This article assumes you are using a Windows XP machine as the host operating system. The most important thing you should know about installing VMware server is that it will use significant amounts of your RAM. You can control the amount of RAM allocated to running virtual servers but it will require a minimum of 256MB per virtual server. Only allocating that much to the virtual servers may be good for your host operating system but will be bad for your virtual servers. Of course, the RAM requirements depend on what you are using the virtual servers for and if you are using the host operating system while you are using the virtual servers. In the end, you need a lot of RAM on your host system to use virtual server. Fortunately, RAM isn’t that expensive today so I would just make sure you have at least 1GB of RAM to be able to run 1-2 virtual servers. Also, remember that you are running other servers inside your host machine. That means that other things like CPU and disk will also be pushed to their maximum. Even with a lot of RAM, you can easily max out your CPU utilization. Keep these facts in mind so that when your machine slows down, you know where to look. Another tip is just to remember that your machine is not invincible. With a standard desktop today and 1GB of RAM, your performance will seriously suffer if you start more than 1 virtual machine and try to use your host OS at the same time. You can probably run more machines with more RAM but you still need to make sure you limit the number of machines you run at the same time.
