Note: Support for Novell NetWare 4.x as a guest operating system is experimental at this time.
NetWare 4.x can be installed in a virtual machine using the standard Novell NetWare 4.x CD.
Before installing the operating system, be sure that you have already created a directory for the new virtual machine and configured it.
Use the VMware ESX Server Configuration Editor to verify the virtual machine's devices are set up as you expect before starting the installation. For example, be sure that your virtual machine is configured for at least 48MB of memory (which the NetWare server installation requires). VMware also recommends that you disable the screen saver on the host system before starting the installation process.
VMware recommends that you install MS-DOS 5.0 or higher in a small (50MB FAT16) partition as described in these guidelines. The rest of the free space on the virtual disk is used for the NetWare partition. Even though the virtual machine should most likely run NetWare most of the time, it is a good idea to install the DOSIDLE.EXE program, which you can download from www.vmware.com/software/dosidle210.zip.
To install NetWare 4.x in a virtual machine:
Note: Once the installation has been completed, you can load and bind the appropriate LAN driver. Selecting or loading a LAN driver during the NetWare 4.x installation may hang the installation process.
where frame_type and network_address are entered as appropriate for your network and nw4-idle is a CPU idle NetWare Loadable Module for NetWare 4.x servers (more on this below). The next time the server is started, the virtual machine's Ethernet adapter should begin working.
NetWare servers do not idle the CPU when the operating system is idle. As a result, a virtual machine takes CPU time from the host regardless of whether the NetWare server software is idle or busy. To prevent unnecessary slowdowns, VMware recommends that you download the NetWare 4 CPU idle program from www.vmware.com/software/Nw4-idle.nlm and copy it to the virtual machine's c:\nwserver directory. The line added to the server's autoexec.ncf file earlier automatically loads the CPU idle program (nw4-idle.nlm) every time the NetWare server boots.
No VMware Tools package exists for NetWare guest operating systems; therefore, NetWare is limited to VGA mode graphics and it is always necessary to use the Ctrl-Alt key combination to release the mouse from the virtual machine.
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