What are the Pro/Cons of VMWare

Kdr Kane · 04-05-2005, 07:43 AM

Agreed, VMWare 4.5 works fine with 2.6 kernels. I wonder where that idea came from.

I've not seen a virtual machine yet that played games well. They aren't designed for that.

maelstrom209 · 04-05-2005, 03:05 PM

Is VMWare too powerful for a laptop? If I'm getting VMWare, I'll be using it on my laptop. It seems that for the best performance I should try using it on desktop computers. In the event that I do buy VMWare, it be mostly for the laptop so if laptops can't handle it, what so I do? Has anyone had issues with VMWare running on laptops? Specifically mine is an Avertec 3200 model. Mine is pretty new but it should be realitively similar to the older versions of this model.

maelstrom209 · 04-05-2005, 04:03 PM

BTW, when I have VMWare, do need to install drivers? Is it possible for me to install drivers at all? There's a few things that I use on a day to day basis that will not really work properly if there's no driver.

jiml8 · 04-05-2005, 05:08 PM

"too powerful" for a laptop? Are you asking if it is a resource hog that a laptop couldn't handle?

The major issue, I think, would be RAM. I have a Gig in my desktop and Mandrake with VMWare and a couple different guest OSs running works quite well, but when I get there I am using all the gig of RAM plus a couple hundred megs of swap.

Earlier today we had a power failure and I had to reboot the system as a consequence, so it is pretty clean after only a few hours. My system is a more or less Mandrake 10 (substantially modified). I am presently running VMWare 4.5.2 with Win2K sp4 loaded. I have Linux Mozilla running (4 windows), and gmplayer is streaming audio from a radio station in Tennessee. I have kmail running and a few system monitors up. I have apache running and mysql is running.

win2K has my development environment loaded and also a website monitoring tool that I use to keep an eye on my commercial site. My Win2K envfironment thinks it has 256 megs of RAM available.

With this load, I have 981 Megs of RAM in use (out of 1010 Megs) and no swap in use.

So, if you use it on a laptop, I would think that you would need at least 512 megs of RAM on the laptop, and more would be better. You could run it in less, but swaps will slow you down.

edit - forgot this part. You can load any drivers you need.

Kdr Kane · 04-06-2005, 10:10 AM

Just download an evaluation version of VMWare and try it for gosh sakes.

Electro · 04-07-2005, 04:54 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by jiml8
It most certainly does work with 2.6 kernels. I use it that way all the time. Where are you getting that?

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.

I had VMware version 4.0. At the time 4.5 came out, I can not update. Now I can and I'm installed Windows 98 in a virtual machine. IMHO, Windows 98 is more responsive than the latest Windows version like Windows 2000 and XP.

fortezza · 04-09-2005, 11:46 PM

I'm a long-time VMWare Workstation user, and it runs well on my P4 2.8 w/1.5Gb RAM. I used to run it on a Toshiba P3 laptop with 512Mb RAM, and that was a bit sluggish. You can set the memory and hard drive space the virtual machine can use, and VMWare's web site has some performance tips for Linux you can try out. All said, I hope version 5 ( I have 4.5 ) has USB 2, Firewire, and at least 100Mb ethernet support. The sound does go flaky ( stutters ) sometimes, so those are the downsides.