Hi,

I have built up some learning curve with VMware Workstation.

I am thinking to set up a virtual machine environment as follows:
1) Use Windows XP as host with 3GB of RAM
2) Use VMware Workstation V6.2
3) run 2 Linux as guests OS

I am not sure if this is a good combination. I need to ensure security.
Can anyone give me some pros & cons of this setting?

Thank you!
Philip

Hello,

If you want to ensure security I'd do it the other way around, use Linux as host and Windows as virtual guest system. Windows is A LOT more vulnerable then Linux. Also in my humble opinion, Linux does a far better job on CPU, memory and disk usage than Windows, so from a stability point of view I'd go for Linux too as host system. But hey, that's just my personal opinion/preference.

Kind regards,

Eric

Hi Eric,

Thanks for your reply. What you say is very much make sense.

But when you say "Linux as host" you mean "Linux server as host" not Linux workstation.
Correct?

Because Linux workstation is "heavy" and I need to find a "lean Linux server" as host.

Thank you.

Philip

You can look at XenServer if you want to run Linux guests.

Hello Philip,

It all depends on your hardware and your knowledge and if your feeling at ease using the command line. If you use the server version of a distribution you get other utilities and your system will not be provided with a lot of packages you'll never use when installing a desktop version or even server with GUI. A server version is more slimmed down then a desktop version.

If I were you I'd download a NETINST of the distribution you want to work with (what distro are you planning to use), if they have one and build your own server using only what you need and want. That way you have a very slimmed down system that just does what you want it to do.

Kind regards,

Eric

I ran linux as a guest under an XP host early on as I made the transition to linux. I tried out different distros and would see if I could open all my documents and such.
The issue I had was performance. Microsoft believes in keeping memory free to speed up opening of new aplications so at any given time your only utilizing half of ram and have a lot of swap in use. Linux will run up to 99% of ram in use and then swap. Well starting up a couple virtual guests would start requesting ram so xp would start swapping which would slow things down to where guests would get slow writing to their virtual disks then they would use more ram and vmware workstation would use more ram which windows would try to swap more out to free up ram, the os basically would fight with itsself trying to keep ram free. I dropped another old hard disk in the system just to get another spindle to put the swap on so help some.
When I did make the switch over and ran xp as the guest under linux I was amazed at the speed improvement, running linux under xp you'll think things are slow, other way around if really fast.

Hi Eric and enine,

Thank you for your feed back. I am not savy on virtualization. But my feeling is:
1) More RAM and larger disk will help performance. (Currently I have 3GB RAM on my PC)
2) For serious web server(s) running as virtual environment, then it is better
that the host Linux is lean (i.e., a Linux server version) and the guest Linux are
also lean (i.e., use Linux server versions).

Hope this is correct.

Philip