Preferred Virtual Machine

[Bruce Fox]

Hi Guys,

For those running VMs, what 'player' do you use?

Preferences, pros & cons etc.

[penagate]

I use VMWare Server on a Linux host.

Pros:

• Interoperable with VMWare ESX, VMWare Workstation, and VMWare Player
• Supports both Linux and Windows hosts
• Easy to port VMs from one machine to another — simply copy the files and add them into the target server
• Snapshots — save the state of a virtual machine at any point (even while running) and restore to that point. Can be automated too
• VMWare Tools for Linux and Windows guests
• Reasonable performance — suspending/resuming VMs is much quicker than using the guest OS's hibernation mode
• Command-line tools for managing VMs and virtual disks
• Highly configurable and scriptable
• Free

Cons:

• Server version 2.0 only supports a web-based management interface — not so bad once you get used to it though
• VM console view doesn't integrate as well as it could with GNOME and Windows user interfaces — I get around this by using remote desktop or VNC viewer and multiple workspaces
• Not as fast as a dedicated hypervisor such as ESX
• Have to rebuild modules every time the host kernel is updated (I think this is true of all Linux virtualisation software though).

[Bruce Fox]

Hi Penagate,

I use VMWare Server on a Linux host.
Pros:

• Free

I'm having a play with VMWare at the moment using VMWare Player (and I will try M$ VM when I get back home). I must say I didn't know VMWare Server was free tho.

Cheers,

[Nightwalker83]

I agree with Penagate! I think you can download VM Server. However, it has activation purposes which I reckon you would need to buy the license key for. I don't know how much the license key cost because I got the software from Tafe and it already come with the license key.

[penagate]

The licence keys are free. You simply need to register for them on the VMWare website.

VMWare Server is their 'entry-level' virtualisation product. VMWare ESX is their enterprise-level server solution and VMWare Workstation is a professional-grade product for workstation machines which provides better integration with the host operating system than VMWare Server.

[visualAd]

Indeed, ESX doesn't run on a host operating system, it includes its own kernel and has complete control of the host system.

[Arrow_Raider]

This wikipedia page can be kind of useful in comparing different virtual machine software:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...rtual_machines

[Lord Orwell]

there's a reason microsoft started giving virtual pc away. And vmware includes better hardware support. Once you have installed the guest OS, you can install a driver package that gives you much better performance.