Well, yesterday evening I said goodbye to VMWare GSX and installed the free successor: VMWare Server !

I knew it had to come sooner or later but due to my crappy Speedtouch 716v5 modem (New post about this modem will be soon available) I was unable to use my real firewall and Copfilter so I had to speed up my plans and upgrade sooner than hoped.
What a night it was. Beforehand, I removed the snapshots of a few of my virtual machines just to make sure everything was in synch.
Started the setup and promptly Server detected that I already had GSX Server installed.
Setup is going to uninstall GSX first is that ok..? [Yes fine]
Setup is uninstalling but in a split second a new screen (with only the top bar visible) popped up with no message. Setup was still trying to uninstall GSX…after some tea and some more waiting and finally after feeling the life flowing from my body, setup had still not uninstalled GSX!
I ran task manager to see what was going on…2 setups were running.
I decided to kill the top one. (nail biting at the same time!)
The popup screen dissappeared and GSX was uninstalled! After that the setup continued with installing VMWare Server….["Feeeeeehhhhwww"] I thought.
After the Pearl thingies were installed, setup got reminded that I killed his poor little popup brother and decided to repay me by rolling back all actions and leaving me with a Windows 2003 server with NO VMWare Server and NO GSX Server anymore….oh the horror of it all…unbelievable but nonetheless true..

What now..? First some Yoga to kill my natural instinct of throwing my server out, through the window…
That helped!
Now rebooted my box, logged in as a local administrator, checked the VMWare directory (there were a few files left), deleted the whole directory, cleaned out the HKLM\VMWare key and started setup again..!

This time VMWare Server did not detect GSX anymore and installed without hassle.
I still have to upgrade my virtual hardware but all things in due time…
So these are the tips I can give you when you are going to upgrade from a production GSX server to VMWare Server:
- Stay calm
- Stay calm (breathe in, breathe out)
- You may be best of, de-installing GSX yourself instead of leaving it to the installer of Server.
- Have a copy of your GSX software ready in case of disaster
- Make sure all VM’s have no more snapshots on them
- Login as local administrator (not sure, but it helped me make it true this ordeal)