For a long time I have been running Homeseer in a Virtual Machine under VMware Server 2.0.

VMware server 2.0 however was end-of-support >1 year ago. The last software update I believe was from 2009/2010. Plus the fact that I had big problems getting it to work on a Windows 7 64-bit host makes me want to move away from VMware Server 2.0.

What is the best VMware Server 2.0 alternative??

There’s a couple of free products.

• Oracles Virtualbox
  also look at the community website www.virtualbox.org
• Citrix Xenserver
• Microsoft Virtual PC
• Promox VE
• VMware ESXi 5

Nice overview: 4 Free Virtualization platforms for Windows
Thread on the Homeseer forum: ‘Whats hosting your HS?’ and ‘virtualization for dummies‘

NOTE: this post is being updated as my research is continuing, more like a ‘working document’

Which to choose?

Virtualbox

– Runs on Windows, OSX, Linux, etc
– Supports USB2 (even though I use a Belkin LAN USB hub)

Citrix Xenserver

– Not familiar with this product
–

Microsoft Virtual PC

– No or bad USB support
– Microsoft product

VMware ESXi

– Only runs on bare metal which is no option for me as I use this server as a Windows
machine – don’t want to run everything virtualized

Related
– Homeseer server migration