Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 21st Mar 2007 16:40 UTC, submitted by anonymous
Virtualization of operating systems used to be slow and hard to use. Advances such as the KQemu accelerator, VirtualBox, VMWare, Xen and of course the recent integration of KVM virtualization into the Linux kernel have helped out a lot though, especially on the server side, but for a normal user, virtualization could be somewhat clunky. Mac users have been able to run their Windows applications like this using Parallels Coherence, yet now other *nix users can too. Ordinary desktop or business users who require applications from another operating system can benefit from a seamless desktop.
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Member since:
2006-05-14
ad a)on decent hardware (with enough ram - 512MB is real minimum) you won't see a difference in speed in applications like office, IE, outlook or something with equal system requirements. Anyway, native is always fastest and i think vmware is slightly faster than qemu+kqemu but not much.
ad b) higher CPU and HDD usage -> shorter battery life
but it is impossible to tell how much shorter it will be, because it also depends on applications running in virtual machine