More and more organizations are consolidating physical hardware using virtualization. But virtualization technology and tools aren’t limited to big-dollar corporations. With the free-as-in-beer VMware Player, and the very cheap VMware Workstation, you too can use this fancy technology to utilize the processing horsepower of cheap multi-core hardware available off-the-shelf. More here.
Desktop Virtualization with VMware Player and Workstation
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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and have only just started to try vmware server, but I’m very impressed. Thanks to a great guide in Ubuntu forums, it was a snap to install, and i can now run 2 or 3 distro’s all at once. Lovely.
My only wish for this software , would be able to use the paid copy of osx Panther i have sitting there. In the future perhaps. Does anyone know if it’s possible with Tiger for Mactels?
I think as long as your CPU supports SSE3 you can install the x86 Version of OS X in VMware but it will be pretty slow.
Better to install OSX86 natively if your hardware is supported.
Edited 2007-01-11 09:40
“Despite the name, VMware Server is also an option. But if you’d rather have the ability to customize and manage several machines, to test and demo network software or run secure machines, evaluate the not-so-expensive VMware Workstation.”
Despite the name you can do all that with VMware Server as well. And even more: you can remotely connect to your virtual machines without need to run VNC on them as author suggested (but failed to accomplish himself).
Without fully understanding and describing what VMware Server does this article is incomplete and a bit disinforming.
It’s not allowed to install OS X in a virtual machine, even if you have a paid copy of it.
No wonder it’s not allowed. That’s Apple, Inc. – enemy number two of interoperability.
I can’t see the link between interoperability and the possibility to install OS X in a VM ?
I can’t help but think that this is really a small ad for Vmware. Personally, I’ve not liked Vmware, since I’ve better experience with QEmu and other products.
However, the article gives a great review of Vmware’s capabilities, and I agree that its features may not be paralleled in the alternative products.
have been running vmplayer with my ubuntu for six months now and decided to switch my double-boot XP to a virtualized XP because is so much convenient.
I have been told it’s not so fast with heavy games, but I do not use any of them. I use XP only for running Chessbase and it’s quite good at that.
Excellent product. Thank you VMWARE.
And it has been asked many many times I guess by ignoramuses like me, but here it goes. Why is it not possible (yet?) to have direct access to hardware, or more specifically graphics cards hardware, in a virtual machine? If we run a VM in the kernel, wouldn’t it be easier to grant such access? Is there no hope ever to get accelerated graphics inside a VM, or, run two OSes independently at the same time? I (and I guess many others) would accept temporarily having a windows disk image laying around for gaming purposes for instance if this was possible. Is there nothing in the horizon here?
I’m perhaps not so interested in hearing about limitations in *current* software implementations of VMs, but would more appreciate hearing about the general principles governing VMs that makes it difficult/impossible to solve and what we might need to solve it. Given the perfect software re-written from scratch, can it at all be done with todays *hardware*?
Naive questions, but what are the major gotchas? The one who cracks this will probably make billions, no?
CPU’s recently gained hardware support for virtualisation, but graphic cards can’t do that yet.
So it’s impossible to use both windows and Linux drivers at the same time. Maybe it will be if ATI Nvidia and Intel produce special drivers for both platforms which will be capable of such function (“sharing” a card), but it’s not even yet on the horizon. And new Vista graphich driver will probably make this even harder (given Microsoft’s interest in getting this supported).
Should be nice having VMWare products (VMWare server, workstation and/or player) running on Solaris x86 as host.
In practical terms, what does VMWare Player give you that QEMU does not?
Just curious. QEMU has thus far served all of my needs. No luck getting Solaris installed in it though. I look forward to KVM.
1. Better virtual driver support; e.g. almost every OS implements video drivers for the VMware virtual video card.
2. Support for snapshots; you can save the state of your virtual machine in several points and return to anyone of them or create branches since a snapshotting point.
3. Better performance than the QEMU raw virtualization; though I do not know how it performs comparing to the QEMU accelerator (kqemu)
4. The VMware server can run several virtual machines in the same machine and you can access them through a client application (like remote desktop) from your machine (and it is totally free also). That’s not possible with Bochs or QEMU.
AD 3. QEMU + kqemu benchmarks:
http://bsdforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=44204
that is old 0.8.2 todays snapshots do a lot better:
http://qemu-forum.ipi.fi/qemu-snapshots
AD 4. You can run as many QEMU virtual machines as You want simultaneously, even with kqemu, You only need NAT for remote desktop access, Opera for example works the same as on host without NAT but not ping:
http://vermaden.proplayer.pl/gfx/screenshots/vermaden-qemu.png