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Why bother hacking the BIOS? Install vmplayer and the prebuilt browser appliance

VMware has posted a response: http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2007/04/response_to_l oa.html

# The test results are another example of "apples to oranges" comparison, and the reason VMware requires a benchmark review to ensure that benchmark test methodology is correct. Here are more details about how the physical and virtual configurations differ:

      1. CPU: In this case, the physical environment consists of dual Intel Xeon processors with hyperthreading enabled i.e. there are 4 logical CPUs in the physical environment. The virtual environment details are not provided, but assuming default values, we imagine the virtual machine is using a single virtual CPU. So in essence the test is comparing results from a 4-processor physical environment to a 1-processor virtual configuration. This can have a huge impact on multi-threaded apps such as this .Net application.
      2. Memory: The physical environment used 2GB memory available to the machine. In the virtual environment, the VM was also assigned 2GB (the article implies that the physical machine has more memory). While all the details are not available, this memory configuration may result in swapping since the host operating system and VMware Server have their own memory requirements.

I would beg to differ.
We've done testing with many tools, and VMware ESX is the fastest true virtualization suite that we've tested.
First off, Virtuozzo isn't a real Virtual Machine hypervisor at all, it's a way to jail applications in a Windows environment so they don't interfere with each other; it doesn't create all-out VMs like the others.
Second, your view on "hardware virtualization" assist is flawed - Intel VT and AMD-V (which are the two virtual assist features out there) both simply make it *easier* to write a Virtual Machine Monitor, not faster. VMware doesn't require AMD-V or VT except in a specific case (64-bit VMs on Intel hardware) because VMware's Binary Translation stuff is *faster* than the built-in CPU instructions. They've had more than half a decade to perfect their virtual machine monitor, and their performance is very, very good.

You see all these new Virtualization products out on the market now that require VT or AMD-V (Xen needs it for windows VMs, KVM needs it period) because now, anyone can write a reasonably-performing VM Monitor by using the build-in CPU features. But that doesn't make it faster!
See this presentation from VMworld 2006 for more info:
http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/tac9463.p df

Although the focus is on virtualization and its effect on performance, I noticed that the author disclosed that he ran the tests on VMWare. The VMWare EULA states in section 3.3 "You may use the Software to conduct internal performance testing and benchmarking studies, the results of which you (and not unauthorized third parties) may publish or publicly disseminate; provided that VMware has reviewed and approved of the methodology, assumptions and other parameters of the study.".

This relates to the earlier slashdot story where xensource had to redact areas of their performance whitepaper

I wonder if they gave him the green light to report these results on VMWare?

Yes: it performs much, much better.

VI3 is actually a suite of products. At the heart is VMware ESX Server, which is actually an operating system in its own right: it runs "on the metal," without having Windows or Linux installed already on the system. It also has a service console operating system which looks suspiciously like a *NIX style operating system, so you can SSH directly to the system, cd into your /vmfs directory and, say, scp disk files over the network. If you wanted to.

However, as a pretty damn safe rule of thumb, no system is going to run faster on equivalent hardware after being virtualized. In a prior job where I was often asked to provide development/test systems, I got phone calls from a lot of people who were bitten hard by the virtualization bug. Whenever someone brought up any issue having to do with infrastructure, no matter how odd or off the wall, they wanted to push virtualization as a solution. I had to explain to them that if your problem is that a web server is slow, the answer isn't to install VMWare server on it, set up two host operating systems, and say, "There! Now I have two web servers." You'd be surprised how pervasive that sort of thinking is, even among people who should patently know better.

Another useful guideline: various types of services are impacted differently by being virtualized. Generally, the best candidates for virtualization are ones that spend a lot of time idle. This is actually more common than you might think - people need a server set up for something, can't put it on a pre-existing system for security/compatibility reasons, so they go out and buy a new system which is ten times more powerful than they need. You can put a lot of these kinds of systems on a single, reasonably powerful ESX server. On the other hand, systems that heavily tax available hardware, especially I/O, are usually much harder to deal with.

Wine http://www.winehq.com/ should do it ok for free, used it in crossover from codeweavers, http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/ca t?cat_id=33 that works ok, if you like you can download a linux VM ware image http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/ and vmware player http://www.vmware.com/products/player/ for windows to test it out without having to play around with the live cd or have to restart.

If you want to test crossover theres always the *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge* ways of getting it for free.

Wine http://www.winehq.com/ should do it ok for free, used it in crossover from codeweavers, http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/ca t?cat_id=33 that works ok, if you like you can download a linux VM ware image http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/ and vmware player http://www.vmware.com/products/player/ for windows to test it out without having to play around with the live cd or have to restart.

If you want to test crossover theres always the *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge* ways of getting it for free.

Amusingly enough, if you run DOS on a virtual machine, it will peg your CPU even when sitting there at a prompt. If you run, say, Windows Server 2003 in a VM, CPU usage hovers around 10% when idle.

I assume there's some busy wait loop in DOS somewhere.

Have you tried Turbo Tax with WINE ( http://www.winehq.org/ ) or CrossOver Office ( http://www.codeweavers.com/ ) which is based on WINE? Also you could use Parallels ( http://www.parallels.com/ ), VMware ( http://www.vmware.com/ ), or QEMU (http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/) to run windows as a guest system so you could have Turbo Tax. Also if you use Quicken you could run it in one of those as well, or move to a software like Moneydance ( http://www.moneydance.com/ ). I moved from Quicken to Moneydance and it transfered all my data quite nicely and works on Win/Lin/OSX natively.

Just some Ideas,

Linux will run on ANY hardware that Windows XP runs on, if you don't mind running shim software.
The Answer

The performance hit is minimal (like 5%, practically unnoticeable), it takes about another 128M of memory on top of any other hardware requirements, and it isn't really suitable for running games in Linux, but other than that - it's the cat's meow, a 100% solution for running Linux on any machine that will run XP. As a bonus, you can backup your entire Linux box by shutting it down and burning the VM files to a DVD, and can port the Linux VM to any other machine without reinstalling (your entire machine intact) simply by copying the VM files to the other box (and installing VMware.) As an additional bonus, now the box will also run any game that is 'Windows only' in native mode, full speed, no excuses. Talk about your best of both worlds. And yes, that's how I'm doing it. Deep beneath the covers in my Linux box is a heart of XP on Intel, and honestly given how well the rig works, I don't care one bit.

Here's a follow-on question to the OP's original, something I've been considering - would you get more functionality out of four dual CPU machines (ie, a single AMD x2 or Core 2 Duo CPU per machine) with a GigE backbone between them, two Quad CPU computers, or a single 8-way box? How would you apply the hardware to get the most out of it, assuming a single user? Assume a KVM hooking multiple machines up to a single nice display / keyboard / mouse / audio. My ideal next rig is going to be eight physical cores, but I'm still kicking around how I am going to arrive at that number - ideas here would likely influence that decision.

She has to run a windows application for her work and it doesn't work under wine so I got the free vmware player but got stuck because you need the commercial version to create a virtual disk.

Maybe try using the free vmware server product and get unstuck?

VMware had a paper, Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server, in OSDI 2002. If you're somewhat versed in OS type concepts, it's easily worth a read. I'm in an OS class now, and this is easily the best paper we've read IMO, at least from a personal perspective. (In other words, which paper grabbed my attention best. There are some older papers that are much more revolutionary, but have concepts that I knew already. The VMware paper is very well written, and it's got some neat ideas.)

The talk a bit about this in the paper. Basically, the randomly scan memory at a slow rate, and if they find pages that are the same, they map them to the same physical page. P.7 has a table of some experiments that they did where in the steady state they found that 7%-40% of physical memory was shared depending on workloads.

Their method doesn't require any OS support or administration, and it's not just OS pages that will be remapped; any page is a candidate. They'll share pages between VMs, within VMs, data, code, whatever. In fact, one popular page to share is a page of all zeros. In one experiment, sharing zero pages alone saved 70 MB.

IBM's z/VM also does page sharing, though I don't think it works the same way as VMware's. It might even require the admin to specify that "these pages should be shared". I don't know.

So not *every* VM sytem will do this (e.g. VMware's desktop products don't), but probably any that are serious contenders in the enterprise space will allow it in some form or another.

And really, VMware's approach at least seems pretty simple; it's in the paper because it's clever, not difficult.

In some cases, you don't even have to shut down virtual machine to move it to a different host. VMWare's VMotion has been doing this for a while. It's very impressive if you've never seen it before. http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/vc/vmotion.html

I just ditched my dual opteron (linux) + shuttle (windows) setup and replaced it with a single Core Duo box with linux virtualized under WinXP. I'm running the VMware free server software (http://www.vmware.com/products/free_virtualizatio n.html) and i have to say i'm impressed.

The only negatives i've found so far (aside from the obvious ones related to two systems in one computer) are some slowdown in mouse responsiveness in the virtualized linux and the lack of hardware accelerated graphics (these might be the same thing, i don't know). You also have to turn off access of the virtualized OS to the DVDROM or everything gets confused.

The positives are that it was piss easy to set up and really "just works". The VMware'd linux talked to my network card without intervention and happily picked up a unique IP from my DHCPD. NIS/NFS to my fileserver "just worked". I can allocate the VMware OS 1 or 2 cores and vary the amount of RAM it sees. My main use for the linux V/OS is molecular dynamics simulations, the software running message passing via LAM/MPI and all compiled under Intel C and Fortran Compilers. Again, all of that "just worked".

In terms of performance, MD calcs done on 1 cpu seem to be at close to full speed for one core, but running them dual gives only an 80% scaling improvement. That slowdown is about as expected, given that there's another OS running. Another nice side benefit is that i can run an MD calc on 1 cpu and play games with the other. I don't notice any lag.

So to summarise - if i'd paid money for VMware i'd be seriously impressed, but for something to do exactly what i want for free is truly amazing.

I find Virtualization to be great for home use.

It's safer to browse the web through a VM that is set to not allow access to your main HD's or partitions. Great for any internet activity really, like P2P or running your own server; if it gets hacked they still can't affect the rest of your system or data outside of the VM's domain. It's also much safer to try out new and untested software from within a VM, in case of virus or spyware infection, or just registry corruption or what have you. I can also be useful for code developement within a protected environment.

Did I mention portability? Keep back-up's of your VM file and run it on any system you want after installing something like the Free VMWare Server:

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

or VMWare Player:

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

And if your VM gets infected or something, just delete it and make a copy of the backup, rinse & run!

I find Virtualization to be great for home use.

It's safer to browse the web through a VM that is set to not allow access to your main HD's or partitions. Great for any internet activity really, like P2P or running your own server; if it gets hacked they still can't affect the rest of your system or data outside of the VM's domain. It's also much safer to try out new and untested software from within a VM, in case of virus or spyware infection, or just registry corruption or what have you. I can also be useful for code developement within a protected environment.

Did I mention portability? Keep back-up's of your VM file and run it on any system you want after installing something like the Free VMWare Server:

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

or VMWare Player:

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

And if your VM gets infected or something, just delete it and make a copy of the backup, rinse & run!

You could also post on slashdot pulling half-baked ideas out of your ass. For the virtual machine to be able to reach the internet, its host needs to have internet access as well. You could firewall the crap out of the VM, it won't do squat for the host no matter how you try to route your traffic, since your front line is wide-open.

Hello, you are stupid! There's actually several implementations of this very idea. It works because vmware will bridge to your network interface.

Virtual Machines, like any other technical innovation, are only as good as the administrator running the show.

Which is why they will help me, but they'll do you no good whatsoever.

I run a dedicated IPCop box on my home network with the plugin for Dan's Guardian content filtering. (I have a 6-year-old daughter.) Running the VM would hardly be noticeable on a modern PC. My IPCop box is a P2 333Mhz with 64 MB because that's what I had on hand. It will run on a lot less.

Check out the VDI initiative that many are already implementing. Virtual Desktops means Vista VMs.

VMWare Workstation officially supports FreeBSD as a guest. Parallels Workstation for Windows and Linux and Parallels Desktop for Mac OS X officially supports FreeBSD as a guest.

Of course, many other *BSDs will also work fine under VMWare and Parallels products as well, even if officially "unsupported".

But all of these statements -- that the Windows Virtualization Technology will be stunning, that Virtualization belongs in the OS, etc. seems to be thowing FUD directly at VMware (and, I assure you, the VMware product is "stunning" -- I particularly like the Server product running on Linux).

To my knowledge (or my opinion, if you prefer), Microsoft ONLY reacts this strongly if their platform is being threatened. And I don't see what the introduction of a bit more enterprise driver support does to threaten Windows.

i have used VMWare server on both linux and windows and i like it. i like that vmware server runs on linux, and that you can trade machines between linux and windows just by copying the VM files. the biggest benefit i see is the VMWare virtual appliance marketplace where you can shop for pre-made vmware machines. a lot of them are free.

at home i use linux, and i have a 2003 server and 2000 pro install both running in VMWare server on an ubuntu desktop. i also have a LAMP appliance and a media wiki appliance set up, but i haven't done a whole lot with them. trading out motherboards and adding a raid controller to the mix had no effect on any of the VMs, even though i moved to a fresh ubuntu install on a bare drive. in fact, i suspended the VMs and they didn't even register the host shutdown.

at work i have a 2003 server hosting a mediawiki appliance on vmware server for windows. it's pretty much a demo for mediawiki as a proof of concept. i also have MS virtual PC 2004 installed on my xp pro workstation and i run a handful of 2000 pro and one slackware virtual PC that i use for different things. setup was a breeze and even slackware runs without a glitch.

i tried to use ms virtual PC on my laptop at home running a wireless network card to host xubuntu for quick access to an environment to surf potentially "hostile" sites such as those that let you download romz. virtual PC doesn't provide it's own "nic", but rather, a pointer to the installed nic. this is fine for servers and desktops, but on a laptop with a linksys network card... well i wasn't interested in ndiswrapper black magic to get the xubuntu VM going just to hunt for romz.

so based on that purely amateur, totally not production experience, i have to say that the VMWare way is cooler. i should mention that i haven't run virtual server 2004 or any version of 2007 yet.

Linux is not the underlying OS of VMware ESX. ESX uses VMware's own proprietary OS, as opposed to the GSX/VMware Server product, that runs on Windows or Linux. ESX just happens to look a lot like linux. And actually, I think that they just re-compiled some of the stuff; since its easier to do that than to re-invent the wheel. To learn more about the VMware product that has got Uncle Bill @ MS worried, you can check out VMware's website for ESX server http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/esx/

It certainly does not imply that Microsoft "believes Linux is that good..." It implies Microsoft is terrified of VMware ESX Server.

It would help if I could link. ...available that includes paravirtualization that I believe is similar...

VMware does already have a modified Linux kernel available that includes that I believe is similar to what Microsoft is proposing for Windows. One can only hope that Microsoft works with VMware for their Longhorn release so that what is included works in conjunction with VMware and their VMI specification

VMware does already have a modified Linux kernel available that includes that I believe is similar to what Microsoft is proposing for Windows. One can only hope that Microsoft works with VMware for their Longhorn release so that what is included works in conjunction with VMware and their VMI specification

VMware does already have a modified Linux kernel available that includes that I believe is similar to what Microsoft is proposing for Windows. One can only hope that Microsoft works with VMware for their Longhorn release so that what is included works in conjunction with VMware and their VMI specification

Just wait until the VMware guys get DirectX 9 working at speed. Then move that to other operating systems.

Imagine being able to play your Windows games, but on an OSX box. Or Linux someday. It would be fantastic. Just make a VM, install your XP on that...then the game. And disconnect the virtual network card so your VM doesn't get pwned.

definitely, but vmware should be seeking to introduce virtualization to other markets. They are already making inroads to business desktops with ACE, but there are many more markets to bring virtualization to. Home computing comes to mind (a virtual PC for each member of the family running on a single physical machine), and i am sure many others.

"You must have been running VMWare! Try Xen."

Ahem. In terms of performance, Xen is _not exactly_ where the open source zealots want it to be:
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/hypervisor_performance.p df

Of course you can always try dismiss this paper by saying the authors (who are paid by VMware) are biased. But why don't you try to benchmark it yourself instead of spreading FUD? You are so sure of yourself, that should not be problem, should it?

It is funny to see your average /. reader speaks highly of Xen (that they have never tried), while the IT industry speaks highly heavily of VMware ESX Server. I run a datacenter, when I need to make a purchase decision, I tend to
1) Talk to my peers
2) Benchmark for myself

No matter how XenSource wants to hype it, Xen is nowhere to be seen in the industry.

Most people that I talk to that are the least bit computer savvy that are interested in linux, are often mislead and think that it's very very hard to use, and that they will have to abandon Windows all together into the land of the unknown that is Linux. What I usually advocate is that I can install Linux *inside* Windows for them, using VMwares free stuff. http://www.vmware.com/products/free_virtualization .html/ I've had a few people tell me this is an awesome way of experimenting, because they can turn it on and off whenever they feel like it, and if they have problems inside Linux they have Windows as their dominant OS running, which is their comfort zone for getting help from either you, or sites, etc. The only problem with this is how well VM's work without 1gb of ram, but almost all PC's and laptop's i've seen in the last year have had at least 768mb of ram, which should be good enough to make it function without being too laggy.

www.vmware.com ?

What does /. think about virtual desktops? At my company we have someone who is pushing Virtual Desktops ( http://www.vmware.com/solutions/desktop/vdi.html ) although I cannot see the advantages over standard PC's. I would also think that Citrix (or something similar) would be a lot better.

Any thoughts?

.... when I first started reading it as they have a concept called Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. The article sounds like the link below:

http://www.vmware.com/solutions/desktop/vdi.html

First download vmware player.
Then download an Linux image
Unzip the image (if necessary)
Point the installed vmware player at the image you downloaded.
Enjoy.

First download vmware player.
Then download an Linux image
Unzip the image (if necessary)
Point the installed vmware player at the image you downloaded.
Enjoy.

I suggest dual booting as many people at least like video/games once in a while. If you have an pre-existing XP system and would like to virtualize it, check out VMware Converter: http://www.vmware.com/whatsnew/converter.html

Actually, VT can be used to enable VMWare Server (the free version) to run 64-bit guest OS's on 32-bit hosts ( http://kb.vmware.com/KanisaPlatform/Publishing/73/ 1901_f.SAL_Public.html). Although, in my experience the performance can be somewhat iffy (http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz .5.437372.14).

Ubuntu is really not the solution someone like the GP was looking for. It's a nice general-purpose server distro, but it's certainly not plug and play. And with Ubuntu's server installation, you're not going to be clicking any buttons, because by default there's no GUI.

I think that the dedicated home-server distros like Smoothwall or maybe Coraid's NAS distro would be more what he's looking for. They're not much harder to set up than a typical broadband router -- you just install from a CD and then do your configuration from a web page -- but they provide a lot of functionality, because they run on commodity PC hardware and run Linux (or BSD, depending).

I think the point the GP is making, and it's a good one, is that not everyone wants something that requires any level of configuration. People want things that are plug and play. Luckily, I think the market has seen this and is producing products that try to fill it: VMWare's list of virtual appliances lists dozens of possible candidates.

To be frank, I think that virtual appliances are the future of Linux and its related (*NIX) OSes, as it goes more and more mainstream. Average users don't want to configure things, which is why we've seen a tendency towards pre-rolled desktop distros and LiveCDs. As people's home networks become more substantial, I think home servers are going to be the same way. The geeks and early adopters will configure their own gear, but average folks want something that can shove in an old PC's disk drive and set up once, then never think about again.

If you have the hardware to run VMWare Server (free) you can always use the FreeNAS VMWare Appliance.

32-bit VT works, is not tuned, and won't be officially supported unless it can offer the same performance that users of 32-bit VMs expect. Which probably won't be for another generation or two of VT-like instructions.

At this point, 32-bit VT is about as useful as support for a 387 math coprocessor on a Pentium - in both cases, the overhead of the support wipes out the gains. 64-bit VT is necessary because Intel CPUs need that to run 64-bit guests (and it is tuned such that performance is similar to 64-bit non-VT); 32-bit VT just isn't necessary, unless you have a reason why it should be?

Why do you want 32-bit VT support? In what case is 32-bit VT desirable?

VMWare I can kind of see, if they were deliberately sticking to all free solutions...

VMWare Server is free (as in beer). It's not open (free as in freedom), granted, but it's free.

I know I can do something like this with VMWare right now, but if it's built in to the kernel that would be even better.

Better why?

Keeping in mind that they have an active interest in promoting this view, a VMWare paper states that their software is substantially faster (we're talking an order of magnitude less overhead in some microbenchmarks) than hardware VM.

step 1: rm -Rf / step 2: install windows

Yes, actually, they can. And, it's free (as in beer).

Although I use VMWare for Win2K, if you don't want to pay for VMWare Workstation, you can use MS's VirtualPC for free while supplies last.

Then you can have an opinion.

In addition to what these guys are saying, you're probably thinking of VMWare Workstation.

VMware ESX runs on "bare metal" - see this page: http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/esx/