
InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy takes an in-depth look at
VMware Workstation 7, VirtualBox 3.1, and Parallels Desktop 4, three technologies at the heart of 'the biggest shake-up for desktop virtualization in years.' The shake-up, which sees Microsoft's once promising Virtual PC
off in the Windows 7 XP Mode weeds, has put VirtualBox -- among the
best free open source software available for Windows -- out front as a general-purpose VM, filling the void left by VMware's move to make Workstation more appealing to developers and admins. Meanwhile, Parallels finally offers a Desktop for Windows on par with its Mac product, as well as Workstation 4 Extreme, which delivers
near native performance for graphics, disk, and network I/O.
Member since:
2005-08-11
Except that vmware server sucks. I hate that web management console, it's slow, it has no context menus, and I've had to reinstall vmware 3 times this year because all of a sudden I couldn't reach the damn server. Somehow, either vmware or Apache is corrupting it's config file. Nobody needs a full blown Apache + Tomcat installation to manage VMs.
VMware Server 1.x was a great product, 2.x blows, and it's all about the management console. That's why at home I'm now using Virtual Box and on Windows Servers, it's Hyper-V (It's free with the Win2k8 Server license)