With last month’s release of VMware Workstation 5, the virtual machine software is better than ever. VMware Workstation now has 64-bit host support, the ability to capture multiple snapshots for each virtual machine, easier sharing of virtual machines, and the ability to connect multiple virtual machines in a “team” setting.
Review: VMware 5.0
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Microsoft’s Virtual PC does, and SVista does.
VMWare even had it working once themselves before they scrapped the effort before it left beta (and the concept of configuration options apparently escaped them completely).
It isn’t a viable solution for me unless it emulates the OSes I need to use. That’s why I suspect I’ll be dropping VMWare for Serenity’s product when it’s finally released.
It’s good but…..
My USB to serial converter is no longer reliable. I use it to program microcontrollers and communicate with serial devices (I’m a electronics engineer), and I can no longer use it for that. My office mate also has communication problems (a software engineer) using v5. Version 4.x worked fine.
all those fancy snapshot features, and sound still doesnt play right, choppy as hell. and vmware will crash with an ‘unimplemented error’ when windows boots up if the /dev/dsp output is already in use from another app. how about some ALSA/JACK support?
I have used it without problem in vmware5 beta, I did not notice anything wrong.
I will make some additional test.
Everything has worked fine for me since the Betas. Now if only they would put multiple snapshop support in GSX server….
I have been using VMWare 5 in beta, and just purchased 5 licenses for me and my crew at work. Very good product and has saved us a TON of time in testing.
The Snapshot manager is awesome! If you create installation programs and you haven’t used VMWare yet, now is definitely the time to take a look!
On Windows XP Pro as a host, the moment you install VMWare (and all its ugly virtual adapters) boxes running samba will have trouble connecting to the host machine. Uninstall VMWare and it works again.
Check VMWare forums. (I have the same problem connecting from OS X and Linux to WindowsXP).
From a feature standpoint, VMware 5 seems like a nice enhancement to the version 4 capabilities. It appears to be more polished and versatile, like the other improvements made since the very first version was released.
The one issue I have found after testing the trial versions of each successive release is that USB support for VMware has become more unstable and unreliable over the last year. The last solid release that never crashed when inserting and removing various USB devices was 4.0. Upon testing 4.5 and 5.0 I have found that it will cause Windows to spontaneously reboot after a few events, another developer who evaluated it found this to be true as well (and subsequently decided against using it). This is too bad, because if others are experiencing this, it could mean that upgrades to newer versions are less likely to happen in scenarious where stability is key – despite the improved feature set.
Overall, it appears to be a good product that is more versatile than Virtual PC. With virtual PC being provided free or at low cost to MSDN members (is this true?), it may lose some traction among developers.
I wonder why only WMP plays sounds correctly(though not that great) while all other players sound like they are crying. This issue has been there for a while and they have still not fixed it. Does anyone have anyidea where this is going ?
personally i do not see the need for usb or sound in a virtual machine anyway, and see 5.0 as a great improvement in compatibility over 4.5.2 (as far as 2.6 kernel and solaris goes).
also, i think os/2 does work, it just has weird timing issues.
Just installed solaris 10 as guest OS,works flawlessly.OpenBSD and FreeBSD (any release) install as well without problem.I sincerely hope they support MacOSX as guest OS in the nearby future ,perhaps it will run faster under the AMD64 (4GB+) than my neighbours i-book 🙂
For those having problems with VMware, could you tell us which OS is the host? Windows or Linux? Which version of Windows or which distro of Linux?
Also another question: a client OS is allocated some portion of the RAM, if I understand it correctly, when you set up the client. Would this lost of RAM only occur when running the client or that portion is no longer available to the host OS after the client OS is installed?
Thanks.
Would this lost of RAM only occur when running the client or that portion is no longer available to the host OS after the client OS is installed?
The amount of memory you assign during the setup of your guest OS install isn’t “gone” inmediedly.It’s the maximum amount of memory that’s *avaible* to the guest OS.If you assign 512 MB this will nor allways mean the guest will use it all.As soon as vmware (and inherently the guest) isn’t running you have the availabillity of the total installed amount of memory.Just not when running one or more guests.
For those having problems with VMware, could you tell us which OS is the host? Windows or Linux? Which version of Windows or which distro of Linux?
Most of the times when running windows as guest OS.But i don’t necesarily have to run it as gues OS :-)BTW,Sound works great from within vmware when running Ubuntu Linux.
The reason we were evaluating USB support in VMware is that we wished to use it as a testbed for USB devices, drivers and applications. The snapshot capability looked like it would provide an excellent mechanism for rolling back and reproducing errors and general testing in a controlled os environment without having to give each developer their own test machine and perform re-imaging.
The potential for virtual machines as low cost, flexible testbeds is quite high.
Thanks for the response.
Most of the times when running windows as guest OS.But i don’t necesarily have to run it as gues OS :-)BTW,Sound works great from within vmware when running Ubuntu Linux.
The nice thing about running Windows as guest OS is that if the guest doesn’t behave, a kick in the behind will get them out of the door.
Oh, which Ubuntu version are you running? Warty or Hoary?
It seems to risky to upgrade the (almost) perfectly running Vmware 4.5 to 5.0 – and find out you are worse off.
Can’t take chances.
I hope by 5.1 all the USB conflicts and sound issues are tackled.
USB Webcam would be nice to have.
And even greater speed is always a bonus.
Incredible how stable Windows XP is under Vmware – it seems to protect the environment from nasties. For almost two years the guest OS never got infected by a virus or trojan. XP Firewall often switched off and updates run very scarcely. The host system is Linux.
Compare that with Windows XP being installed natively on my laptop – in seconds (even with precaution) it gets attacked and completely infected. Very frustrating.