One of the best things that I've ever done business-wise was buy a smokin' server to sit under my desk. Besides providing my inner geek with a source of endless joy, my server has made me insanely more productive. With it I've thrown together a handful of virtual machines using VMware Server - and I can use them for all sorts of things.

For example, one is a 'build' box where I compile video/flash/etc for my Camtasia Studio videos. This leaves my 'authoring' box free from massive CPU hogging, and I get the added benefit of being able to use a 3GHz Xeon processor for the actually rendering. (What I've done is created a share on the server itself that both my 'authoring box' (my laptop) and my 'build box' (the VM) both 'see' as mapped drive V:\.)

I've also created a base VM for use as a VPN box. For each of my clients that I need to use VPN access for, I can just create a new copy of that VM, slap the VPN software on to it, and never have to worry about virtual drivers and other crap from Cisco clashing with Nortel's VPN software and so on. More importantly, I don't have to worry about losing my own network connection on my main box when I'm VPN-ed into a client's network.

But, one thing that always bugged me was that attaching a VMware Server Console from my main box into my server always resulted in a bit of a 'laggy' connection to the VM. My mouse would be a bit sticky/sluggish, and it was obvious that I was just seeing some ugly network latency. If I RDP-ed (terminal service-d) into those VMs there was no latency.. but using RDP into a machine that will then VPN into another network obviously gets ugly. Plus I just like being able to toggle between various VMs running on my server using the VMware Server Console.

So, poking around one day in VMware Server's Server Console, I noticed the Host Menu - which has a Settings menu option. If you open that and flip to the Connection tab, you can tell the Server Console that it can connect to remote hosts without SSL. Obviously that's not a good move if you don't trust your network - but with my Server sitting literally feet away, and protected from the evils of teh intarweb by my network's firewall, this seemed like an obviously setting to toggle.

Best of all, after turning that off, all of my laggy latency simply dissappeared. Without SSL I simply can NOT tell that I'm using Virtual Machines - everything responds in real-time and is incredibly slick.