Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Thu 20th Oct 2005 02:17 UTC
VMWare released today the VMWare Player, a freely downloadable tool that 'plays' virtual machines (it just doesn't let you create any). This can prove a very important tool for OS makers who would like to demo their OS to new users, users who don't want to burn live CDs and also keep the OS makers safe from any hardware incompatibilities in the user's machine (as the OS would run inside VMWare Player, the compatibility is always guaranteed). VMWare already posted a demo for their VMWare Player, a 200 MB 'Browser Appliance' based on Ubuntu.
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Xen requires support from the host kernel. So does VMWare. Some of the stuff they do simply can not be done from user-space applications. That's not the reason that Xen can't run on Windows as a host OS.
Xen does require than the GUEST operating system be modified to run under Xen. The technique it uses is called paravirtualization, and allows Xen to run much faster than VMWare (especially in I/O performance). That's why Xen can only run open source OSes at the moment.
When processors with hardware virtualization support become available from AMD and Intel, that restriction will be lifted.