Re: vmware

[greg <frog@intertek.net>]

On Sat, 2003-11-29 at 11:42, Robert G. (Doc) Savage wrote:


Well written and easy to understand, thanks for that Doc.
> 
> Some of VMware's characteristics aren't readily apparent to new users:
> 
> 1. It is a voracious consumer of system resources. If one Windows
> virtual machine requires 256M of RAM, 5G of hard disk space, and a CPU
> running 400MHz, it will take those from the host and not give them back.
> Running two virtual machines at the same time doubles the demands on the
> host. It takes a hugely overbuilt system to run VMware with decent
> performance levels. My minimum recommendations would be 1GHz CPU and 1G
> of RAM. More will improve the performance of both host and guest
> operating systems.
> 
> 2. PC hardware varieties are increasing faster than VMware can support
> them. This is particularly true of USB and FireWire stuff that Windows
> supports very well, but where Linux drivers are still in beta (or
> earlier). If you're a cutting edge kind of hardware person, you're
> probably going to run into support problems faster than less than your
> less adventurous friends.
> 
> 3. New users are sometimes surprised by some of VMware's hardware
> limitations. For example, if you have two open VMware sessions running
> Windows, only one of them can use physical resources like your CD-ROM
> and floppy drives, serial ports, etc. You will probably want to disable
> autostart for CDs when you run a VMware session with Windows. Otherwise
> the documentation warns you that things might get a confused.
> 
> 4. VMware tech support is nowhere nearly as robust or easy to find as it
> is for either Windows or Linux. It requires expert knowledge levels in
> both operating systems as well as the underlying hardware. VMware offers
> fairly good technical support through a variety of newsgroups
> (http://www.vmware.com/support/using/newsgroups.html). Telephone support
> is not available.
> 
> 5. VMware is expensive to first-time buyers. Upgrades from previous
> versions are reasonably priced. It is the best available product to run
> Windows applications under Linux, and it's priced accordingly. If you
> have to run applications that emulators (Wine, Win4Lin, Crossover, etc.)
> don't support, it's an easy choice. The same is true if you're running
> Windows apps in a commercial environment. But if you are just a casual
> user of Windows applications, it's cheaper and easier to buy a bigger
> hard drive and dual boot.
> 
> 6. There are several VMware products. Workstation is just one of them.
> The GSX and ESX servers can run Windows-type servers like SQL Server in
> virtual machines on big Linux iron.
> 
> Hope this helps...
> 
> --Doc
> 
> 
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