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Old 03-24-2005, 02:34 PM   #1
maelstrom209
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What are the Pro/Cons of VMWare


I'm thinking about using VMWare on my laptop because sometimes I'd need to use Windows. I've thought about dual booting but having to reboot to switch OS everytime is not going to really effective for me. So I'm concluded that VMWare's virtual desktop software could be the best thing. I have no experience with using software like VMWare so I'm reluctant to move forward until I can learn some more. From reading some threads it appears that VMWare might not always work smoothly. One of the things I read about was the difficultly in setting up FAT32 partition. Another problem I read about was that people had problems putting a Windows OS onto the virtual partition.

So I wanted to find out the range of problems people had and about how difficult it was to fix the problem that is assuming the problem could be fixed at all. Since I'm going to be spending money on this I really want to know that I'm not wasting my money on something that isn't going to work. Any help or advice would be really great. Thanks!
 
Old 03-24-2005, 04:39 PM   #2
Whatsisname
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edit: oops wrong thread
 
Old 03-24-2005, 06:56 PM   #3
jiml8
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I use VMWare all the time. I have FAT16 partitions and NTFS partitions. I have Win2K, WinNT, and DOS virtual machines. It all works, pretty much flawlessly.

I love it. Video is too slow for games, but that is the only downside.
 
Old 03-24-2005, 08:07 PM   #4
randyding
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Same here, my company has 400+ and I'm sure 1/3 of them have vmware, both linux on windows and wondows on linux. We use it for everything and it installs perfectly. I just purchased my own copy for home use and installed it on my RHEL 4 to run windows 2000 apps for work purposes. Its a very good product.
 
Old 03-24-2005, 08:07 PM   #5
Kdr Kane
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I use it all the time.

In fact, virtual machines usually are easier to install any operating system simply because the virtual devices are well supported.

Where it's going to hurt you is if you're expecting 3D graphics or some other high end (specialized) device driver. It'd be easier to answer if you knew which applications you're planning to install. If you're simply going for office applications and internet, you'll be fine.

File systems are no problem and I think you heard a bad rumor on that one.
 
Old 03-25-2005, 11:11 AM   #6
maelstrom209
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I most likely will be installing VMWare onto my LInux laptop. When I order VMWare, does it come on a disc with an installer or do I have to compile if from source? With something that I paid for I would feel much at ease to have a disc with an installer because sometimes I compile wrong and make the program not work. I think there's an option for download which I saw but I didn't find anything about sending a CD. Thanks for all the response so far!
 
Old 03-25-2005, 09:55 PM   #7
jiml8
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I originally downloaded the evaluation copy and when I purchased it they sent me a key. Install the key and it is registered. I never got a disk.

VMWare has an installer. That installer will compile an interface to match your kernel. No getting around that.
 
Old 03-25-2005, 11:52 PM   #8
maelstrom209
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Can I uninstall VMWare without messing up my OS if something were to go wrong? I haven't had to format my computer with a new OS in a while and would like to keep it that way. I hope that if something were to go wrong I can undo it with the least amount of damage. But of course, having no problems at all would be better.
 
Old 03-26-2005, 11:05 AM   #9
randyding
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Yes, I downloaded the RPM and installed that, works great. I even un-installed the RPM when I upgraded from 4.5 to a 5.0 beta. No problem on RHEL 4.

Here is how it installs...
1. it installs itself and some libraries in /usr/bin and /usr/lib, they all get removed when you uninstall (I checked).
2. it installs a init.d script called /etc/rc.d/init.d/vmware so the drivers and services get loaded on bootup, run levels 2345.
3. in your home directory it creates a directory called ~/vmware where all the virtual machine data gets stored. There is a group of files associated with each VM, including file-system data for the guest OS. These file-system data files are split into 2 gig max files, and make up the virtual disk for the VMs you run.
4. You run a script called vmware-config.pl and it compiles a few drivers and installs them. They are specific to your kernel.
5. You can now start vmware and it will let you install your guest os.

When you un-ininstall (in my case erase the RPM) your home directory data files remain so when you re-install or upgrade vmware you can re-open your old sessions.

P.S. I LOVE the vmware snapshot feature....
Say for example you are using windows to browse a web site and *boom* you get the latest nasty virus. All you do is open the snapshot manager and double-click the previous OS snapshot and you are back to where you were before you got the virus. You can make snapshots at any time by clicking the snapshot button. Its awsome.

One more thing, my linux computer has 2 NICs, one for WAN (internet) and one for my internal linux network. When you install vmware and run the vmware-config.pl script you get to choose which physical NIC that the virtual guest OS NIC will bridge to. This way your guest OS appears to IP-Tables as though it were just another computer on your internal network, which means the guest OS is behind your firewall. Again, awsome.
 
Old 03-26-2005, 03:56 PM   #10
stingo
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Use Win4lin, runs much much faster and smother. Rock solid with win 98 and pro version supports XP. No issues. I tried both vmware and win4lin. Win4lin has direct access to linux filesystems, while with vmware you have to fiddle with samba, which is slow and inconvenient.
 
Old 04-04-2005, 06:38 PM   #11
maelstrom209
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How does Win4Lin compare to VMWare. Both has its pros and cons but I found them too similar to come up with a decision. what makes Win4Lin better than VMWare?
 
Old 04-04-2005, 09:10 PM   #12
jiml8
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It has been a couple of years since I looked into this. At the time, I passed on Win4Lin because it only handled win98/winme. If it now handles Win2K/WinXP then it has improved considerably.

Of course, VMWare has also improved considerably over the last couple of years. I can't speak about the current Win4Lin, but the current VMWare provides nearly perfect compatibility. I experience literally no issues except that zip disks don't work, the video is too slow for gaming (which doesn't bother me), and hard drives are a bit slower than native. VMWare permits multiple guest OSs to run simultaneously. I do my windows development work in Win2k running in Linux VMWare, and when I need to test my installation, I fire up another Win2K environment that is a nonpersistent environment (when I shut it down, no changes are saved) so I can always test my package on a clean installation.

I lately have been fooling with MySQL in a heterogeneous LAN environment; to make my LAN I host MySQL on my Mandrake system then I load VMWare and fire up Win2K, Win98, and Knoppix - all at once. I then have a Mandrake host which is a whole LAN all in one box. Wonderful for testing. Considering that I also have Apache running on the Mandrake host, you can see that I have a whole test internet running in one computer.

The capability is formidable.

VMWare ain't cheap, though.
 
Old 04-04-2005, 09:31 PM   #13
Kdr Kane
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Win4Lin only runs Win9x/ME on top of Linux.

VMWare lets you run any OS on top of Linux isolated in its own virtual machine and can even run on its own isolated network.
 
Old 04-05-2005, 02:16 AM   #14
Electro
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The only problem that I have with VMware is it does not work with 2.6.x kernels, but it works well with 2.4.x kernels. Only two modules gets compiled, so do not worry.

The advantages of VMware is it can handle all USB and Firewire devices while win4lin can not. Also VMware is able to handle a gigabyte of memory. If you have USB scanners, USB printers, USB sound, and some firewire devices will work in VMware because of course manufactures support Windows. Soon VMware will get added performance by hardware virtuallization by processors (I think AMD will be first to instroduce a processor with this feature), so the performance of VMware will improve. Xensource has a program to do the same thing as VMware is doing now for free although it can only handle a virtual machine running Linux. Xensource is planning to add a feature to install Windows.

For fast I/O, I suggest using either JFS or XFS. They are very fast filesystems when handling large files. I made an 8 GB virtual drive file (no spliting) in VMware and it read the file without any problems.

VMware is fast enough to play games but not 3D games. It can play Starcraft, Diablo, Warcraft, and many other games that uses directdraw. Do not include sound for the virtual machine or else it will stutter or performance will be slow.

To get good performance in VMware, make sure you have atleast 512 MB of memory, a fast hard drive (probably you want to place the image on a RAID 0 array), and using an high performance filesystem like JFS or XFS (probably XFS is the best).

randyding, does VMware 5.0 beta work with kernel version 2.6.x because I would like to use VMware in a faster system than a AMD Athlon 700 MHz which I use to run VMware.
 
Old 04-05-2005, 07:17 AM   #15
jiml8
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Quote:
The only problem that I have with VMware is it does not work with 2.6.x kernels, but it works well with 2.4.x kernels. Only two modules gets compiled, so do not worry.
It most certainly does work with 2.6 kernels. I use it that way all the time. Where are you getting that?
Quote:
Do not include sound for the virtual machine or else it will stutter or performance will be slow.
Sound works fine here, particularly if I run VMWare in full screen mode. In the past I have had sound problems and others currently do, but for me it works quite well. Indistinguishable in most circumstances (unless the processor is heavily tasked) from running it in native linux.

Last edited by jiml8; 04-05-2005 at 07:19 AM.
 
  


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