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:2005-07-06
> Anyway, native is always fastest and i think vmware is
> slightly faster than qemu+kqemu but not much.
Depends. CPU/memory performance is roughly comparable, but VMware is *way* better at screen performance. See http://forums.bsdnexus.com/viewtopic.php?id=1580 for some tests I did.
Caveat: this is on FreeBSD, and uses Win4BSD (based on qemu/kqemu) and a very old version of VMware. I would think the general result holds.
Member since:2006-08-29
> i think vmware is slightly faster than qemu+kqemu but
> not much.
VMWare is faster but most of the *perceived* performance benefit's over Qemu with the kernel accelerator module (and -kernel-kqemu) are due (in the case of Windows gusts atleast) to the guest side VGA and mouse drivers (bundled with VMWare Tools) which make the guest UI far more responsive and smooth. Qemu on the other hand opts to emulate real world hardware and your guest will use real world drivers.
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