Apologies if this is not the proper group for this discussion...
Our situation:
We have a client/server application that essentially involves a desktop application that occasionally reports back and sends data to a web application.
Our sales people bounce around from place to place and consequently network to network when making sales calls and doing software demonstrations. Because of this, and because many of the locations that our sales team visits have no network access at all, we need to be able to run a version of the web side of our application locally on the individual sales persons desktop.
Traditionally we have run a self contained LAMP style app (XAMPP) on the sales laptops that our local client application talks to. For a variety of reasons this solution is becoming less and less viable. We have starting looking for a replacement solution and VMWare is one of our possible options. The plan would be to set up a LAMP VM on each sales laptop that could then serve the web side for our desktop application.
Each VM would need to have a static non-network dependant IP addess that could be accessed by the Host OS which would be running the client application.
Further, each VM would also need to be able to access the net periodically to update the web application.
We would like to be able to build a single LAMP VM then distribute that to our individual sales people.
A few questions...
If we went the VMWare route what would we end up needing in terms of licenses? At a glance it would seem that we would need a copy of Workstation to build the VM and copies of Player for each of the sales machines. However, it does not seem like Player gives you enough control over the networking side to meet our (seemingly simple) networking requirements.
What would be the best way to meet our networking requirements with VMWare? Should we set up two interfaces, one bridged for occasional network access the other NAT or host only for static IP access from the host OS? Is there a better way to handle this?
Any guidance appreciated.
