Linked by Roberto Dohnert on Mon 23rd Jun 2003 02:31 UTC
If you have a mixed network like I do sometimes you have to compromise. At my job we run Windows, Linux and a sole Mac (Graphics dept.) and lets face it, when you do consulting work and if you design and develop custom applications you have to be able to develop for your clients platform and as much as I hate it, it's a Windows world. Before I used to have 2 workstations, one Windows and one Linux, or I had to dual boot. In the past, virtual machines have been lacking. Either they were too slow or lacking a certain pizazz to get the job done. Enter VMWare Workstation 4.
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VMWare is great indeed. I've been using it for years, but was not sure if upgrading was worthwhile. More speed is better, I think that is compelling enough.
And for others here: VMWare virtualizes a PC (like Boch does). But it does it differently. Boch emulates instructions, VMWare only protected instructions. That's why VMWare is so much faster. The disadvantage is that VMWare works only on i386.
And not only can you run Windows and Linux side by side, but it's very easy to run FreeBSD on Linux as well, or Plan 9, or whatever.
The people who mention dual boot miss two points: with one single laptop I can travel the world and have 10 OSes available at a mouse click. You don't really think I can carry 10 laptops around, do you? Not to mention hardware support and driver issues.
The second point they miss is doing cross platform development. Ever tried to write software that runs on multiple OSes? Change a line of code, test it on a few OSes. So reboot, wait, wait wait. Oops, didn't work. Oops, code is on NTFS file system, and that is read-only in Linux. Reboot. Fix line. Reboot, wait, wait wait. Ah works. Reboot, select other OS. I hope you get the point now.
With VMWare you can easily have a few OSes running. They mount your src directory using CIFS or NFS, or plain ftp, and you can just simultanously test a lot of things. I type my code in one editor (Emacs), and compile it on different OSes. You really don't know what you miss if you haven't tried to do this with VMWare.
There is not much software worth my money, but VMWare definitively does.