I thought I'd give a run down on my interesting configuration for anyone who's looking for an idea of what can be done with NCT.

COMPUTER:  Quad Core 4Gig RAM Dell Server

VMWare:  Server 2 Beta 2 (64 bit binary)

HOST OS:  64 bit Linux CentOS5

GUEST OS:  32 bit WinXP3 1 CPU, 1GB RAM

Observations:

1.  DO use XPSP3 and the most current NCT software.  Runs much smoother.

2.  DO use VMWare Server 2 Beta 2.   Yes it is still in beta, but seem much more stable than VMWare Server 1 for this purpose.

3.  DO upgrade your virtual machines to version 6;  it appears much more stable.  Yes you can't go back so DO make a backup copy if you may want to go back to an older version of VMWare.

4.  DO NOT put more than one CPU per virtual machine.  Not sure if this is a VMWare bug or Windows bug, but if you use more than 1 CPU per machine you can kiss that same number of real CPU's goodbye as they will not really be available anymore for other virtual machines.

5.  Be careful about stopping services and processes in taskmanager when others are using the NCT sessions.  You may discover this may cause the VM to max out on CPU usage, effectively making the machine unusable.  Usually requires to do a hard boot of the VM.

6.  Fast hard disks will improve your VM performance.  Too many things accessing the hard disk will make the NCT sessions on the VM's seem very laggy.  I suggest 15K RPM drives or striped drives to improve disk performance (I am not using either right now) .

7.  We are using a USB to Serial port converter to connect an old handheld reader to a L230.  One thing we appear to have problems with may be port speed (unconfirmed).  We recently dropped the COM port speed to 19200 from 38400 to see if the serial connection works better.  I have also plugged in printers, keyboards and flash drives all at the same time to a L230 using a USB hub.  All devices were detected and usable.

8.  DO make sure you have enough RAM allocated to your VM.  Look in TaskManager on your VM on the Performance tab.  If the Total Commit Charge is greater than the Total Physical Memory, DO allocate more memory to the machine.  Once the Commit Charge goes higher than the Physical Memory, you are using more memory than your computer has and IT WILL SLOW IT DOWN SIGNIFICANTLY.

9.  We regularly have 7 or 8 users on one VM NCT Host with an average Commit Charge of about 600 to 700 MB.

10.  NIU ROCKS.  Please release a final version of it.  :)

11.  DO Please add any comments that would help further improve this configuration.

interesting, maybe you can write what you are trying to do with this virtual mashines.

what are the advantages of this for users and server?

I have experimented with some virutalisation software but with no result.

I'm not sure I understand your question.  The whole point of VMWare is to make better use of hardware resources.  This is also the point of NCT.  Therefore by putting the 2 together, that make one physical machine running Linux hosting 2 virtual machines running XP allows us now to have 1 physical computer with 20 NCT terminal sessions.  The limit of users on one physical machine then becomes dependant on the number of XP licenses you have and the available resources of your host computer.