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Installing Novell NetWare 5 into a Virtual Machine

Note: Support for Novell NetWare 5 as a guest operating system is experimental at this time.

NetWare 5 can be installed in a virtual machine using the standard Novell NetWare 5 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 Workstation 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.

To install NetWare 5 in a virtual machine:

  1. Insert the NetWare 5 CD in the CD-ROM drive.
  2. Power on the virtual machine to start the NetWare server installation process. The virtual machine should be able to boot from the NetWare 5 CD. Install the software in a virtual machine as you would for a physical PC.
  3. If the virtual machine has been configured for networking (bridged, host-only, etc.), then the installation detects a PCI Ethernet adapter and prompts you with a list of possible drivers. Select the AMD PCnet PCI Ethernet card to continue with the installation.
  4. When the installer starts the NetWare 5 graphical console, the mouse is not recognized unless you move the mouse while the graphical console is being loaded. You can use the graphical console with just the keyboard or disable the graphical console by removing the startx.ncf entry from the server's autoexec.ncf file at a later time.
  5. Finish the NetWare 5 Server installation by following the on-screen instructions. Once the software has been installed; you can remove the startx.ncf line from the autoexec.ncf file if you want to prevent the new NetWare 5 graphical console from starting.
  6. Once the NetWare software has been installed, switch to the server console and type edit autoexec.ncf. Add the following line to the server's autoexec.ncf file, anywhere below the line that starts with file server name:
    load c:\nwserver\nw5-idle

    nw5-idle is a CPU idle NetWare Loadable Module for NetWare 5 servers (more on this below).

  7. Once you have updated the server's autoexec.ncf file with the above line, down the server and type exit to return to a DOS prompt.

    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 5 CPU idle program from www.vmware.com/software/Nw5-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 (nw5-idle.nlm) every time the NetWare server boots.

Known Issues

The new graphical console in NetWare 5 does not detect or recognize the virtual machine's PS/2 mouse. As a result, the graphical console can be operated only by using a keyboard.

No VMware Tools package exists for NetWare guest operating systems; therefore, NetWare is limited to only 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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