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Yeah, I should change my sig to, "Life doesn't have an undo button, neither does Slashdot."

I like the FOSS thing but VMware does a good job. When I installed it I was under the impression that it was open source from this page. I have nothing against proprietary software. For my limited need for windows software there is no way I am shelling out cash when I have a FOSS alternative.

As I noted above my whole method of running wine is messed up. But it suits my needs.

check this out... i think you are talking out of your arse

http://vmware.com/pdf/GuestOS_guide.pdf

i think it says 32mb. but yes, nifty concept--- and pricey as all get. my organization would love to use it, but can't justify the cost for a nonprofit.

http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/features.html
"Small footprint. Reduce virtualization complexity with ESX Server 3i , a compact 32MB formfactor of ESX Server ,that is a fraction of the size of a general purpose operating system, providing unmatched security and reliability"

Does Vmware support Ubuntu or Debian, or other non-commercial Distributions?

I've found this link:
http://pubs.vmware.com/guestnotes/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm

But i don't know what the VMware lingo "supported" actually means.

I have both Norton AV and Clamav running on Mac systems. There are only a few pieces of malware for Macs (non-potent) now but since we have share files and data between other OS we need to scan files that we get from them which can be infected even they won't really affect the Mac. If you have virtualization programs like Parallels or VMware and have Windows, an piece of malware can infect the virtual OS. Remember the recently VMware announced an vulnerability in VMware where the guest OS can affect host OS.
http://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2008-0005.html
The worst stuff from email with sends all of us junk that hopefully that the mail server will filter out most malware but your system will need to filter any leakers that pass through the mail server.
We have been under the radar of most of the malware writers but as Mac gets more popular we will get a dose of Windows malware pain sooner or later.

"If it's for school only, then the 13" macbook is perfect for the backpack and can run your choice of Linux or OS X or both, plus a number of legacy applications from Windows."

Um, it can also run current Windows apps using BootCamp with no emulation, full hardware support, or you can use Parallels, or VMWare.

At that point it can run more applications (outside of hardware limits like having an integrated GPU) than any Windows machine, natively. Kinda nice...

Check out page 25 of this document: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/GuestOS_guide.pdf

According to the Guest OS compatibility table, FreeBSD 6.2 is supported on VMWare Workstation 6.0.2 and VMWare ACE 2.0.2

Having said that, VMWare guest is running on a fairly standard sort of virtualised platform. With VMWare ESX 3.5 you can use a Buslogic virtual scsi controller or an LSI virtual scsi controller. So you may have to do some fiddling to get FreeBSD to load the appropriate device driver (don't ask me how, I've only ever done generic installs of FreeBSD)

VMWare ESX Server 3.5 will (officially) support:
  * Ubuntu Linux 7.04
  * Solaris 10 for x86
  * Suze Linux Enterprise Server 10
  * Redhat Enterprise Linux 5
and various other OSs...

I've been using ESX 3.5 on an HP DL385 G2 with dual core Opterons and 8GB of RAM, I wonder if that is powerful enough to run Vista as a guest OS... :-)

Try downloading something from a server that has a good connection:

http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmserver/VMware-server-installer-1.0.4-56528.exe

Not every server has a huge pipe coming into it. Comcast can only provide so much

There are perfectly good reasons for running virtualized desktop OSes on server hardware. In fact, VMware is already doing this and marketing this as the next big thing in virtualization, called VDI or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure: http://www.vmware.com/solutions/desktop/vdi.html

Basically you take an ESX server that would normally host 2-15 server OS instances and pile it on with 40-50 Windows XP or Windows Vista virtual instances. You fire them all up and let the end users remote desktop into THEIR PC from their thin client, sh*t-box, or less-than-new PC. The endpoint is no longer the endpoint as you can firewall off everything between your clients and ESX servers except RDP port. With tools provided by VMware and various 3rd parties you can more easily patch the clients. With VMotion you have 99.999% uptime. With a VPN your users can get to their desktop from wherever, whenever - you don't need offices.

Eventually they'll combine this technology with VMware ACE, so you can synchronize your laptop VM instance from your offline laptop to the Data Center to be backed up and vice-versa if your laptop HD dies, I'd wager.

It's not a bad idea really, but I'm not sure how it benefits me from an IT manager point of view compared to a standard terminal server or Citrix server quite yet, unless the ACE synch thing really does happen. I do know of a few local companies that are testing it out atm though regardless.

What I find missing in all the comments so far is the completely different approach to virtualization that VMware has when compared to MS and Xen. The in MS/Xen model, the hypervisor is flat out part of the OS, and the VMs rely on some sort of Dom0 or master partition where most of the real drivers exist.

In the VMware model (think ESX 3i), the hypervisor is a completely different layer that sits under the OS, so there is no direct OS dependency. All the drivers are specially designed and engineered to be high performance for that kind of environment, a reason why it scales so much better (at least when compared to Xen) and also a reason why they don't support all the devices out there.

I think for most of us that care about freedom of choice, the VMware model makes more sense going forward. A good, OS independent, thin hypervisor with standard open interfaces (VMI) for any guest OS kernel that wants to leverage paravirtualization, or just a full hardware abstraction via the VMM for the ones that do not, coupled with good, open source set of instrumentation tools and accelerated drivers.

On top of that, VMware has open sourced their virtual disk format (VMDK), has collaborated with Xen on a completely open VM portable packaging format (OVF), and has a number of fully open source programs. This is allowing the developing of the Virtual Appliance concept and has facilitated the penetration of Linux in places that wouldn't have otherwise.

Now, because I work for VMware (use as disclaimer also), I can tell you that the bread and butter for us is NOT the hypervisor, but all the stack we built on top of it, that includes disaster recovery, lab automation, VM lifecycle and a bunch of other very very high level stuff.

Still, competition is good for the market, open source or not, and as users, we'll all benefit.

What I find missing in all the comments so far is the completely different approach to virtualization that VMware has when compared to MS and Xen. The in MS/Xen model, the hypervisor is flat out part of the OS, and the VMs rely on some sort of Dom0 or master partition where most of the real drivers exist.

In the VMware model (think ESX 3i), the hypervisor is a completely different layer that sits under the OS, so there is no direct OS dependency. All the drivers are specially designed and engineered to be high performance for that kind of environment, a reason why it scales so much better (at least when compared to Xen) and also a reason why they don't support all the devices out there.

I think for most of us that care about freedom of choice, the VMware model makes more sense going forward. A good, OS independent, thin hypervisor with standard open interfaces (VMI) for any guest OS kernel that wants to leverage paravirtualization, or just a full hardware abstraction via the VMM for the ones that do not, coupled with good, open source set of instrumentation tools and accelerated drivers.

On top of that, VMware has open sourced their virtual disk format (VMDK), has collaborated with Xen on a completely open VM portable packaging format (OVF), and has a number of fully open source programs. This is allowing the developing of the Virtual Appliance concept and has facilitated the penetration of Linux in places that wouldn't have otherwise.

Now, because I work for VMware (use as disclaimer also), I can tell you that the bread and butter for us is NOT the hypervisor, but all the stack we built on top of it, that includes disaster recovery, lab automation, VM lifecycle and a bunch of other very very high level stuff.

Still, competition is good for the market, open source or not, and as users, we'll all benefit.

What I find missing in all the comments so far is the completely different approach to virtualization that VMware has when compared to MS and Xen. The in MS/Xen model, the hypervisor is flat out part of the OS, and the VMs rely on some sort of Dom0 or master partition where most of the real drivers exist.

In the VMware model (think ESX 3i), the hypervisor is a completely different layer that sits under the OS, so there is no direct OS dependency. All the drivers are specially designed and engineered to be high performance for that kind of environment, a reason why it scales so much better (at least when compared to Xen) and also a reason why they don't support all the devices out there.

I think for most of us that care about freedom of choice, the VMware model makes more sense going forward. A good, OS independent, thin hypervisor with standard open interfaces (VMI) for any guest OS kernel that wants to leverage paravirtualization, or just a full hardware abstraction via the VMM for the ones that do not, coupled with good, open source set of instrumentation tools and accelerated drivers.

On top of that, VMware has open sourced their virtual disk format (VMDK), has collaborated with Xen on a completely open VM portable packaging format (OVF), and has a number of fully open source programs. This is allowing the developing of the Virtual Appliance concept and has facilitated the penetration of Linux in places that wouldn't have otherwise.

Now, because I work for VMware (use as disclaimer also), I can tell you that the bread and butter for us is NOT the hypervisor, but all the stack we built on top of it, that includes disaster recovery, lab automation, VM lifecycle and a bunch of other very very high level stuff.

Still, competition is good for the market, open source or not, and as users, we'll all benefit.

What I find missing in all the comments so far is the completely different approach to virtualization that VMware has when compared to MS and Xen. The in MS/Xen model, the hypervisor is flat out part of the OS, and the VMs rely on some sort of Dom0 or master partition where most of the real drivers exist.

In the VMware model (think ESX 3i), the hypervisor is a completely different layer that sits under the OS, so there is no direct OS dependency. All the drivers are specially designed and engineered to be high performance for that kind of environment, a reason why it scales so much better (at least when compared to Xen) and also a reason why they don't support all the devices out there.

I think for most of us that care about freedom of choice, the VMware model makes more sense going forward. A good, OS independent, thin hypervisor with standard open interfaces (VMI) for any guest OS kernel that wants to leverage paravirtualization, or just a full hardware abstraction via the VMM for the ones that do not, coupled with good, open source set of instrumentation tools and accelerated drivers.

On top of that, VMware has open sourced their virtual disk format (VMDK), has collaborated with Xen on a completely open VM portable packaging format (OVF), and has a number of fully open source programs. This is allowing the developing of the Virtual Appliance concept and has facilitated the penetration of Linux in places that wouldn't have otherwise.

Now, because I work for VMware (use as disclaimer also), I can tell you that the bread and butter for us is NOT the hypervisor, but all the stack we built on top of it, that includes disaster recovery, lab automation, VM lifecycle and a bunch of other very very high level stuff.

Still, competition is good for the market, open source or not, and as users, we'll all benefit.

What I find missing in all the comments so far is the completely different approach to virtualization that VMware has when compared to MS and Xen. The in MS/Xen model, the hypervisor is flat out part of the OS, and the VMs rely on some sort of Dom0 or master partition where most of the real drivers exist.

In the VMware model (think ESX 3i), the hypervisor is a completely different layer that sits under the OS, so there is no direct OS dependency. All the drivers are specially designed and engineered to be high performance for that kind of environment, a reason why it scales so much better (at least when compared to Xen) and also a reason why they don't support all the devices out there.

I think for most of us that care about freedom of choice, the VMware model makes more sense going forward. A good, OS independent, thin hypervisor with standard open interfaces (VMI) for any guest OS kernel that wants to leverage paravirtualization, or just a full hardware abstraction via the VMM for the ones that do not, coupled with good, open source set of instrumentation tools and accelerated drivers.

On top of that, VMware has open sourced their virtual disk format (VMDK), has collaborated with Xen on a completely open VM portable packaging format (OVF), and has a number of fully open source programs. This is allowing the developing of the Virtual Appliance concept and has facilitated the penetration of Linux in places that wouldn't have otherwise.

Now, because I work for VMware (use as disclaimer also), I can tell you that the bread and butter for us is NOT the hypervisor, but all the stack we built on top of it, that includes disaster recovery, lab automation, VM lifecycle and a bunch of other very very high level stuff.

Still, competition is good for the market, open source or not, and as users, we'll all benefit.

"The [VMWare] documentation is awful. Just.... Awful. There's tons of it to be sure, but it's contradictory, badly written, confusing and downright wrong in places."

I haven't looked at them for a year, but in the past the VMWare Virtual Appliances were more likely to hurt VMWare's reputation than help it, in my opinion.

Depending on the type of load each company has throughout the day/night, there are usually high and lows in the overall system usage which can be used to save some power apart from simply going virtual.

VMware has cool management tools for this and the shutting down of systems is managed by Distributed Power Management (DPM). http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/vc/drs.html Has more details.

So not only can you save power with shutting down servers, but the HVAC systems get their load reduced as while the servers are off. Mind you this only works well (automagically) with newer systems that support Wake on Lan (WoL).

Otherwise have your NOC monkeys take care of it instead of sleeping :)

Let's face facts, there is tons of software that is not on Linux that people want. How much longer is the Linux community going to ignore this fact?

WTF?

Maybe you've heard of VMWare?

Or, perhaps, Wine?

Or maybe you've noticed that software like Open Office and FireFox is cross platform, running on Win/Mac/Linux ? Toolkits such as GTK Java, Flash and QT allow for easy, straightforward cross-platform development?

Or, perhaps, that there's a whole operating system being put together utilizing all these parts?

Get your head out from under that rock! (or is it... Mom's basement?)

You're lazy, aren't you? He gave the name of one product in his comment. A Google would have given you what you need. DOSBox

Now, I'll simply add: FreeDOS, which is really really really good. Better than any PC-DOS or MS-DOS I've ever used. Either run it native on an older machine, or dump it in a virtual machine. Oh, yes, I guess you want a link for that too: VMWare.

But on a more serious note, the part about Linux not having Office and Adobe and all that jazz is bogus. Ever hear of VMware? Lets you run Windows or Mac on a Linux box (or Linux on a Windows box, or Windows XP on a Mac, for that matter). Works pretty decent, provided you have enough resources to handle it all,...

It is possible to just mount the vmware disk image without actually starting the VM. Check out vmware-mount.pl. I have used this to pull files out of old virtual machine files in the past with no problems. Maybe this is what you meant by exporting the files?

Agreed, but Windows costs more than the double of what Linux costs:

• Windows requires as much or more administration than Linux.
• Windows has as much or more updating and upgrading hurdles as Linux.
• If you have a problem with Windows, it's not like Microsoft is going to hold your hand and fix it for you quickly. Most times I needed technical support for a commercial product, I realised I would fix the problems myself quicker and better, if I could do it (if I had the source).
• If you have problems with bugs in Windows, you have to wait for Microsoft to fix it, if they decide to fix it.
• With Windows you're more prone to more serious security problems. Of course there are vulnerabilities in Linux as well, but I've never seen something as wild as the chaos caused by ILOVEYOU and NIMDA in Linux.
• With Windows you have to spend with server licenses, client licenses, extra CALs if your clients are not Windows. If that was not enough, you still have to pay for an antivirus. With LAMP you don't need any licenses. Not to mention that you have to manage all the licenses. And don't lose any media, it's not like you can easily download it from their site!

So, while Linux is not gratis, it's still much cheaper than Windows. Especially for Web systems such as LAMP, most distributions allow you to install it as easily as one command (or even a graphical installer), and you can even download a virtual machine that you can use as a development or testing environment without even having to install anything.

If there is one thing that still can be cheaper in Windows, is that you can hire a Windows administrator for cheap, while a Linux administrator would probably require a higher pay. But this is changing with the popularization of Linux, there are more Linux admins in the market today. Another point is that you get what you pay for, the cheap Windows administrator probably won't do that good a job, and if you want quality you'll probably have to pay as much as you would pay to a good Linux administrator anyway.

On VM Ware ESX Server Consolidated Backup or ESX Ranger appear to be the way forward but if you're operating on a low budget or nil budget and can afford a little downtime then VM Ware Server (inc the free version) comes with a scripting language (vmrun) which allows you to stop, copy and snapshot servers overnight. On the VMWare community forum there's a vb script that's been written here, it seems a little elaborate to me but the theory is there.

Linux of course - because Windows sucks goatse's backside.

Yeah... which is why you run it under VMware 3i. No "Native" OS to worry about, just pure hypervisor goodness.

http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/esx/esx3i.html

Have a great day!

Tim

On the VMware side, there's several options. VMware's Consolidated Backup does exactly this. Also you can look at ESX Ranger.

VMware player is open source:

http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

It also has a secure browsing "virtual appliance," or virtual machine with software pre-installed:

http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/browserapp.html

The software is open-source.

VMware player is open source:

http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

It also has a secure browsing "virtual appliance," or virtual machine with software pre-installed:

http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/browserapp.html

The software is open-source.

Works well in VMware; and some thoughtful soul created a pre-built VM. Now my testing VM menagerie is complete.

Ugh. He said decent -that disqualifies Virtualbox, sorry.

You can get virtual pc 2007 and VMware Server for free. If you have the money to spend, VMware workstation 6 is your best bet.

Avoid everything else (virtual box and qemu specifically) like the fucking plague -at least until one or both of them improve a hell of a lot more in the speed department.

Software that actually works. It's in use. It's actively being maintained. As new technology is released, there's a proven track record of it being incorporated into the software.

Then you're really making a mistake if you don't look at citadel.

Email, Calendaring, Contacts, multiple interfaces, multiple standards compliant protocols, instant messaging and it all can run on one server. But wait.. It scales! So if you want to run multiple servers and have them communicate, go ahead. It's built right in.

Visit http://citadel.org/ for more information and to download or there's even a vmware appliance, all set up and ready to go. All you need to do is download and run. Try http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/723. -

This is not true. I run 5.5, under latest kernel with Ubuntu. Try this.

http://communities.vmware.com/message/76957

I had better performance when removing the Tickless System (dynamic ticks) for the kernel... compile... install... voila...

Get the latest version 1.x of VMware Server (the new UI for beta-2 is Web-based and should be avoided), install the latest any-any patch if your distro needs it (since my Debian box does, I'd expect Ubuntu to), run the installation off the any-any patch script. Install VMware Tools from the iso you will create when you dearchive VMware in the install process.

Then install W2000 as a VMware Server guest. After that, install SAMBA to make it possible for your Linux and Windows apps to work with the same filespace on the Linux box. Note that the Windows "disk" is one or more flat-files which exist in the Linux filesystem as .vmdk files and a .vmx config file. No separate disk partition is needed.

You get out of this a working shared clipboard between Linux host and Windows guest (cut and paste from your Linux web browser to your open copy of Word, for instance) and a stabler W2000 than you've ever seen running on native hardware.

I found dual-boot such a PITA that it drove me off Linux until I could get a virtualization app that worked. It's far easier and much more productive to have Windows as an X-Window in an integrated virtualization environment. It's a lot of work in initial setup, but you only have to do it once.

And when you back up, you can back up your Windows and Linux setup at the same time.

Critical servers are not typically virtualized because they get good performance or for consolidation reasons, but http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct9468.pdf because of http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct0107.pdf DR. Since storage IO is http://communities.vmware.com/thread/73745?tstart=15&start=275 slower inside a virtualized enviroment you will need to spend some more time to plan your storage environment and implement it right in order to get the expected performance even if it might a bit be more expensive.

Lars

Critical servers are not typically virtualized because they get good performance or for consolidation reasons, but http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct9468.pdf because of http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct0107.pdf DR. Since storage IO is http://communities.vmware.com/thread/73745?tstart=15&start=275 slower inside a virtualized enviroment you will need to spend some more time to plan your storage environment and implement it right in order to get the expected performance even if it might a bit be more expensive.

Lars

Critical servers are not typically virtualized because they get good performance or for consolidation reasons, but http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct9468.pdf because of http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct0107.pdf DR. Since storage IO is http://communities.vmware.com/thread/73745?tstart=15&start=275 slower inside a virtualized enviroment you will need to spend some more time to plan your storage environment and implement it right in order to get the expected performance even if it might a bit be more expensive.

Lars

BitTorrent is being used for legal purposes, for example vmware is using it to distribute perfectly legal content.
Thanks to the influence the media mafia has on my employer, I have to download those at home, on my own expense.

IIRC, ESX only ships with linux in the service console. The actual vmkernel is not based on linux.

VMware Workstation has experimental support for D3D.

i believe Xen will work also, but i don't know to what extent.

1. Download vmware-package from debian(i386, amd64) and click on downloaded package to install using Gdebi (or use dpkg -i [downloaded file])
2. Download VMware player 2.0.1 (.tar)
3. Open up a terminal window, and type

   make-vmpkg -k -r sudo VMware-player-2.0.1-55017.i386.tar.gz

4. Install the .deb files generated by the above process (install in this order: vmware-lib, vmware-bin, vmware-kernel-modules, vmware-common, vmware-player).

first off, ever heard of virtual machines? There are hundreds of pre-configured virtual machines out there( see some here: http://vmware.com/appliances/ ) and sites like rPath( http://www.rpath.com/rbuilder ) even give you a pretty simple way to create your own. And the players are free and you can purchase versions with multi-VM management features for deployment. So there is no hardware cost for either deploying a Linux and OSS solution or just testing it.

Secondly, it just might be time someone learned a little about Linux and OSS because dumping money into MS solutions is so yesterday.

And last, are IT managers dictating tools and they don't know about Linux and OSS? Talk about keeping a blind eye on what's going on in the market. Just the savings in client licenses should be enough to make him/her realize they could do alot more with their budgets with just a little OSS in or outside of virtual machines. And I'm still talking about this being on your Windows boxes.

I know there are still many archaic Windows shops out there so your not alone. The other day I ran into some guys at lunch who use spreadsheets to keep track of version control and bugs. I clued them in on subversion and bugzilla and how they could put those in VM's and start acting like a real shop.

LoB

Yes it does.

It's here here, and here.

And actually VM Ware 1.1 beta currently has experimental support for DirectX 9. That doesn't mean that all games will work, but it's another reason why native mac gaming may be slow(er) to take off.

I carried my little white 2001 iBook in a gym bag back and forth to the office for 4 years, before retiring it for it's final year to home only as a couch computer. It finally gave up the ghost after 5.5 years, and two drops to the linoleum covered floor in my living room -- once from 2 feet, once from three and a half. I wish Apple still used the bullet proof glass for iBook cases. That iBook sure took a beatin' before it belly-uped .