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VMware Signs Deal with Microsoft
ken_i_m writes "VMware has signed an OEM deal with Microsoft to offer various flavors of Windows pre-installed with their product. Here is VMware's news release." Don't get too angry about this; if you're using VMware, you're probably loading up a version of Windows anyway.
Microsoft probably sees VMWare as just another OEM. I mean... look at it! They, Microsoft, probably would prefer that if you were to purchase VMWare, you'd have to purchase a copy of Windows with it or do without. I, for one, have an old licensed copy of Win95 that would do just fine thank you very much! I see no reason to buy another copy everytime I buy a new machine - virtual or otherwise.
I will consider VMWare a product that is recomendable by me until such time as you can't buy it without purchasing another copy of Windows.
I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to purchase VMWare.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
If you ordered the CD version of VMWare for Windows NT/2000 1.0, you got a second CD with a copy of SuSE 6.1 preinstalled on a disk image.
It was rather nice. I'd always wanted to try SuSE out, but never had the time. This was so easy and the image ran under my copy of VMWare for Linux as well.
"And what exactly do they lose by that?"
What they lose is they legitimize a platform that they often tell people is "not up to the job" and "not robust enough". Plus they help pave the way to loosen their death grip on the market. If I were an IT manager, i'd look at this and think. Hmm maybe I really can replace windows on the desktop, get a lot more stable environment but not have to give up all those bloody applications that i paid through the nose for.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
It's a nice solution for what it is, but it's not going to put a full Windows box on your desktop.
Pretty much doubt it. Though I'm starting to come under the persuasion that Linux is a great server OS but not the best of desktop OS's. When I'm at home running Linux it feels almost like running NT Server for a workstation. I'm of the opinion that we need Linux as the server and something like BeOS for the desktop. I would definately prefer an OSS desktop though. I came across AtheOS the other day. It looks designwise similar to BeOS and it is GPL. Unfortunately I couldn't try it out b/c my video card isn't supported. Hardware support is still a bit lacking.
In Republican America phones tap you.
VMware has been a boon to me. Not only can I run win98 (slowly), but I get to experiment with FreeBSD 3.1 and Solaris 2.6. I had trouble installing BOTH of these OS's on naked hardware. It's nice to finally get a chance to use them.
Of course, OS/2 didn't like vmware AT ALL. I tried to get win3.1 loaded, but I lost the last disk!! Probably not that big a deal.
I will be able to try out other linux distro's as well. VMware is a great tool. Now, I need more HD space...
Not quite true - OS/2 guest support for VMware is now available as 'experimental', i.e. unlikely to work that well but should do something. See their website for details, probably the Support section.
The pre-installed images would be delivered as virtual disk files, i.e. they could only ever be run from under VMware. Hence it would be quite easy to get the install to work reliably (after all, NT works very well on the VMware virtual hardware).
Re SMP - see the VMware support site, I think this is covered (though you may need to re-install NT onto a virtual disk then mount the other disks as data disks).
Re BeOS - I agree, it's a matter of getting Be interested in this. BeOS 4.5 does get halfway through the boot sequence...
Exactly - I suspect VMware did quite a bit of testing to find out exactly which hardware ran NT, Win98 and other OSs with high stability, then worked out which hardware was easy to emulate, and chose the intersection for their VM spec.
:1, leaving :0 as the main Linux+X display), you could make it easy to toggle into a full-screen Windows session. However, you would lose Linux/open source brownie points big time :)
Of course, the corollary for this is that if you buy an AMD PCnet NIC, SB16, and so on, it should be ultra stable at running NT...
I wouldn't really recommend NT+VMware+Linux as an elegant solution for reliable applications, but if there's an app that runs only on Windows, it's not a bad approach.
For a dedicated 'Windows' workstation, you could even run VMware instead of a window manager, in full screen mode, so the system appears to boot 'right into Windows'. If you ran this on another X display (e.g.
One other datapoint - I had problems getting Active Directory to install on Win2000 RC2 native (repeatedly locked up the machine completely), so I re-installed onto a virtual disk within VMware. And of course, Active Directory ran just fine (if a little slowly, Win2000 is heavier on the machine at least compared to NT, when running on VMware).
YMMV of course...
It's a DirectX issue, NT has a very old version. You might want to try running Win2000 or Win98 in a VM. However, the VMware emulated hardware is quite basic - e.g. SB16 sound - so you might still have problems.
:)
VMware is not really intended for playing games at the moment - stick to dual booting until it gets better, or buy Linux games
I wonder what the perfomance of a MAME running on Windows 98 VM running inside of Vmware running on Windows NT running inside of Vmware running on Redhat running inside of Connectixes Virtual PC running on a Mac G4/450 would be?
Aside from MAME, it'd be interesting to run some standard benchmark, or nearly standard, like Bytemark or SPEC (if someone with the $$$ for SPEC was interested) to see how much the CPU bogs down with each layer of emulation. Theoretically, if VMWare just passes x86 instructions to the processor, each additional instance should only suffer a small bit, rather than getting completely mangled.
Alternatively, one could run slackware inside of debian inside of openlinux inside of redhat inside of turbo linux... yikes!
While this is both a great move for VMWare and potentially a great new product for consumers, I have my doubts about how well a "one size fits all" preinstall can work on all machines.
This should be fine for MS-DOS 98, but IIRC on an NT system some of the low level system stuff has to match between the real machine and the virtual machine (e.g. the HAL). I wonder if VMWare intends to have different images for different configurations... This could be a real pain for the user.
Of course, I've met some of the guys who work on this and I have faith in their ability to work it out.
/* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
As long as VMWare is still selling a version with no operating system (and it appears they intend to continue doing so) I see no reason to complain about a "tax" on the Windows-bundled versions.
To me this just seems like an even better tool for those IT admins who want to start deploying other operating systems in their organizations.
/* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
Oh come on, it is no such thing. It wouldn't surprise me at all if VMWare started including a linux distro for all the people using VMWare for Windows, so that they could run linux in a box without having to go download a distro over a phone line. (Actually, that's not a bad idea at all. And it'd cost them next to nothing.) Would that make linux the inferior operating system?
Microsoft cares about one thing: selling copies of their software.
:)
If they can sell Windows, Office, and add-ons to people running these under VMware, it's no different than selling Windows, Office, and add-ons to people running these on actual x86 boxes.
The problem for Microsoft comes about when people move from a Windows-only box to running Windows under VMware to not running Windows at all. But historically, they've been better at creating good applications than creating good operating systems.
If they can reduce the operating system problem to an application level (more features) without having to worry about reliability (hey, just reboot or restart VMware), that's good for them.
'Course, you could argue they already do this...
------------------
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Umm, excuse me? They are going to package windows as a client OS inside their *linux* product. Why install windows inside windows? They've had their windows product a long while and already have (IIRC) a deal with Redhat to package Redhat with vmware, so that NT users can install linux under vmware, this just turns it around, to sell pre-capsulated windows with vmware for linux
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
My linux box has worked flawlessly with three different cable modems on two different services (@Home - static, and Bresnanlink - dynamic).
</me too>
What I liked was the last guy said, oh, well you probably know enough about networking to get this running, so unless you want help with it right now, I won't screw with your stuff...
I like it when people realize you have a clue, so they don't insist on 'I have to install this for you and screw up netscape, all your settings, etc...' (and support afterwards is still free).
Question though - what is 'pump'? Is that a util that RR gives you? Never heard of it....
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
You must first admit that there is a problem.
This seems to show that Microsoft is beginning to admit that it is in denail about it's inferior products.
After the admission you must discover what you are in denial about.
Microsoft now must identify which products are inferior. (IMHO every single one of them except freecell)
After discovering your areas of denial you must fix them.
For Microsoft I think this is impossible. Once a project hits a certian point you must scrap it. Kinda like a nuclear explosion. Once the Plutonium or Uranium starts to FIZZ you can't stop it.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
At US$300 plus, they could OEM Win9x in there and hardly notice. I was all set to buy a copy when I thought it was $99 but it ain't worth three times that per seat.
Besides which, I'm still having fits with making the networking work on the eval copy.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
A good point. I'm trying to get rid of Windows, but it would be nice to have the option to buy a bundle so that I can mostly run Linux and use VMWare to run the Windows-only games that I have.
...
Like The Sims
Will in Seattle
The key word here is "offer." If you so desire, you can get the "Ready To Run" version of VMWare with an image of the version of Windows of your choice, for a price.
:)
Sounds good to me. Then you don't have to make a boot floppy, FDISK and format your imaginary partition, sit through the installation which goes even slower than normal since it's running in VMware... And it gives me a good reason to get a completely legitimate windows license.
VMware does not support OS/2 as a guest operating system, and VMware doesn't run on OS/2. That pretty much makes your point moot.
Seriously, OS/2 has tcp/ip and has had it for a long time. If you don't have "Warp Connect", which is the default LAN install, you have to add it as an add-on. I bet that's what you had.
Browsers were a problem. There was a version of Netscape for it at one point, but I don't think it did Java. I had better luck installing an X Server on OS/2 and running Netscape off of a Unix box.
The cake is a pie
> You can pay $200 for an upgrade copy of W2k, wow.
If you buy a motherboard & CPU you can get Windows 2000 Pro OEM, the full package, not merely an upgrade, for $135. I just did last week, and it arrived yesterday.
I haven't installed it yet, but I must say, the CD is beautiful! They put a "holographic" image on it. If it were a Pokemon card, it would be worth $100 easy. My SGI/Debian CD looks positively dowdy in comparison. So even if the OS is unusably bad, which isn't very likely, I feel I will have gotten my money's worth.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Is it really a bad thing that Micros~1 is acknowledging that their product should be run with VMWare? I run Windows in VMWare for one reason.. I can run linux ALL THE TIME and just boot up Windows when and if I need it (about once a month in my case) without rebooting my system. I think this is a victory for the people who want to migrate off Windows onto linux (like myself). It allows us to run all our linux stuff and occasionally run those few Windows apps that we can't live without until they're ported.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Warp 3.0, original version, has no networking support, true. But there was an updated version, called Warp Connect, which did. The latest client is now 4.0, which has full TCP/IP & SMB support, and very nice it is too. Netscape 4.61 etc. IBM recently released a new version of the server version, Warp Server for e-business, and a new client based on the same kernel is rumoured to coming in September. Whatever anyone says, OS/2 is NOT dead. There's still lots of us left using it, and the GUI beats anything I've seen before by miles. It's far more object-ified than ANYTHING else, much nicer. But I guess that's just my opinion. Linux is nice, too - so's this BeOS 5 I'm just playing with. But seriously, I would recommend OS/2 to anyone who's interested. Have a look at http://www.os2ss.com/
Well, Since Linux companies are plummeting in value, and companies who deal with linux are realizing that there is no money to be made with it, this is the natural evolution. VMWare has got to sell itself as a MICROSOFT
compatible product, that lets you run linux, not the other way around. IBM is getting out of Redhat, and, as Redhat goes, so goes linux. Once Dell dumps linux (soon), Linux will be regulated back as a Fringe OS.. Then you know
how the Mac/BeOS people feel.
Is there any evidence that dell is going to drop linux support in the near future? I would like so hard evidence for this one.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
If you buy OS/2 you're already paying for a copy of Windows, since IBM pays Microsoft a royalty on most copies of OS/2 sold (Not OS/2 for Windows but I don't think you can find that anymore.)
So if you buy vmware to run OS/2 (Assuming that's possible) you'll most likely be paying Microsoft 3 times for Windows -- one for the pre-load on your machine, one for VMware and one for OS/2.
Microsoft must think that's amusing.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I use vmware.I'm a web developer and I spend a lot of time testing my pages in different browsers. I used to have a bunch of machines with different configs. win95/3.x browsers, win98 4.0 browsers, soon win2k/5.0 browsers, and a 3.1 machine with others. Now, I have two machines linux with 3 vmware 'windows' an a native Win box. (drivers are not the same for color checking in vmware). I love the fact that I can test different browsers on one machine. Besides the virtual networking is really cool.
-- Andy
* "Uncle this droid is malfunctioning" -- Luke Skywalker
Can't be a tax, must be a fine, because, A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
O.K., so you eliminate the pain of the Windows install. To me that's only the beginning of the pain, reguardless of. I wonder if it also eliminates the pain of reinstalling?
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
17) Now I want to overclock this bad boy 18) Yes, but can I run Beowulf on that? 19) Taco sux
Oops, sorry. My mouse was sticking and I double clicked the Submit button.
kwsNI
Isn't using Windows enough of a tax?
Office is where their money comes from anyway.
Don't forget Asheron's Call.
kwsNI
If you have the commercial version... mount the cd... locate install.exe... and change to that directory.
type: wine -display localhost:0 -winver win95 install.exe
choose 'no' to install directx, other defaults are generally acceptable.
It only works in linux in 256 640x480.
To play: cd to the install directory and '
wine -display localhost:0 -winver win95 -depth 8 \ > -geom 640x480 Starcraft.exe
(it assumes your windows partion is mounted as /c) I don't have the game, so I havn't had a chance to try it, poor poor pitiful me
---
Now I would like to know if they have sign a deal with some Linux corps (RedHat, Suse, Debian ...) or *BSD groups to distribute their distros with VMWare for NT.
Maybe this new deal keep them from distributing another OS ???
--- Bouh !!! ---
Pipe-dreams aside, I really wonder why M$ does so poorly at a (semi-) solved problem when they have an essentially infinite amount of money and (AFAIK) talent. Maybe Gates', "They're users, they won't care" attitude spreads through the intranet there. Or maybe there really is a god.
Or maybe Gates hacks on the release code every now and then, and the last guy who changed his code was never heard from again.
I can see that this is good for Vmware as it solves some potential worries about M$ attacking them through licensing schemes that only allow windoze to be run on actual hardware. I guess this is good for VMware users because it might mean that windoze runs better on VMware and better supports the virtual machine. But what I don't get is why this is good for M$, what do they gain? What they lose is that they are helping people make the break to a more stable platform and relegating windoze to be simply an application launcher and runtime environment.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Maybe this is just Microsoft's way of fixing bugs in the Windoze operating systems? I can see it now - Microsoft Win2001 installs Linux, VMWare, and their OS. OS runs on VMWare, with the setting tricked out so it cannot corrupt itself into uselessness, and viola! It will be at least as stable as Windows 3.1 (I remember those days - it crashed often, but I never had to reinstall the OS).
Wouldn't that be a hoot? The system could also be "journaled" through VMWare so that the OS from before the last five software installs was accessable. Then you could "undo" a software install that fsck'd up the DLLs for other programs.
Hey, this could work....(Just my luck, trying to be funny and now I'm sitting here thinking seriously about it!).
P.S. I know VMWare does not do all that now. (Just to head off the knuckleheads that flame^H^H^H^H^Hreply without "getting" the humor).
This caught my eye early this morning, and my first reaction was, "Are they going to raise the price of VMWare?" There's already a "Windows tax" on new PC's, is there going to be one on VMWare?
I have to wonder if this is the first step of Micro$oft's plan to move into Linux territory. Why port Office to Linux, if they can keep all the Windows-to-Linux converts using Office? Office is where their money comes from anyway.
I treat this in the same way that I treated the annoucement of Micro$oft's investment in Apple -- partly for the PR, partly to make it seem like they are playing nice in the business field, and partly to see if this can be a profitable outlet for Office and their other tools.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
(darren)
And that's a good sign.
The cake is a pie
Visit here for a starting point. Remember, any application that will run on Win 3.11 sans 32S will run on Warp 3. You'll probably be limited to an older version of Nutscrape, but one is available. Some applications of note: Gimp, Opera, mpg123, MAME, Doom..
.sig: Now legally binding!
This is a good idea, but I'm just curious if this means they'll bundle more pre-installed OS images in the future. You know, like a pre-configured Solaris VM, or even another Linux distro that's already set up for a particular purpose. That would be pretty cool.
Then I got to thinking... I wonder if there's any clause in the deal that prohibits VMWare from bundling a "ready-to-run" image of another OS down the road?
And if so, would it even apply to a bundled Linux config?
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
I know this is a offtopic, but there isn't really a place to tell it, so I'm putting it here,
IT'S HEMOS'S BIRTHDAY TODAY!!!!!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY HEMOS!!!!
Besides, why would a natural reaction to good news for a successful product that many power users use make people "angry". Do the story posters have to be so anti-MS?
/. reaction to the merest insinuation that someone may be running Windows without a large-caliber weapon held to their head by a jack-booted MStormtrooper.
I'm guessing the poster is referring to the inevitable knee-jerk fizzing-at-the-mouth
I am sure there would be a market for compressed images of multiple operating systems. Imagine for $10 getting a variety pack that included compressed VMWare images of the *BSDs, Solaris 8, several distributions of Linux, EROS, and BeOS?
Very handy for someone who wants to play around, or for a starting place for testing...
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
The press release said that this is optional. I know that this will be good for those people that wish to keep all their licensing P's and Q's in a row. Some of my systems came with Win98 preinstalled, so running them with vmware isn't a problem. Other of my systems didn't, and I had to go out and buy an extra copy of win98. If I had the option to purchase direct from vmware, it would save me a trip.
The only down side I can see to this is if, in the future, the purchase doesn't become optional.
Actually you are quite close to the truth - Windows NT on top of VMware on Linux never, ever BSODs, whereas a similar NT-only system at work crashes every few weeks (happened today), while my NT laptop used to crash all the time when I used it a lot.
VMware's website has a case study of a law firm who installed Linux and VMware in order to run Windows with fewer crashes - so this is not just my experience...
One useful feature in VMware 2.0 is the 'suspend to disk' feature (like some laptops but no OS APM or ACPI support required). Currently you can only suspend to disk as part of suspending the VM.
However, it would be possible to save the Windows or other OS state to disk in an identical way every 5 minutes or so (the save to disk is quite fast if you have enough memory as it goes to Linux buffer cache). This would mean you could recover from any Windows/other crash, no matter how bad, back to your state as of N minutes ago.
This is similar to some Windows products that recover your state, but is much more likely to be bullet proof since it's done through the VM mechanism.
It would also be useful when testing out bleeding edge Linux kernels, of course...
Why should we be angry about this? Microsoft is conceding that people run other operating systems, and that their product fits well in a window. By endorsing a product that puts theirs in a window, they admit that you might make other choices for your underlying system. Essentially, this is an admission of an inferior product - people can now get the Windows functionality without the penalties of actually running windows.
And once we get people to run Windows in a Window, it becomes easier to open people up to completely different alternatives w/o legacy support.
Besides, why would a natural reaction to good news for a successful product that many power users use make people "angry". Do the story posters have to be so anti-MS?
This is a summary of all the comments at level 1 and below, so that everyone browsing at +2 can get an abstract.
1.) M$ is evil.
2.) MicroShaft will never win.
3.) This program sucks. Release it under the GPL.
4.) Hot grits!
5.) The GPL sucks. Use a BSD-style license instead.
6.) This is not news. We had this running years ago on my old system using a packaged version of and a box of .
7.) Natalie Portman! Hot Grits!
8.) Slashdot sucks now. I remember when the stories where written in C and posted in binary, so you had to disassemble before you could read.
9.) 3y3 0wN j00r b0x!
10.) This is old news. Macs have had this for years.
11.) Damn linux heads! You just hate MS b/c you are jealous. MS Roolz! By the way, can someone teach me how to make a "boot disk"?
12.) This is old news. This was invented at Xerox-PARC.
13.) Too bad Amazon already has a patent!
14.) I hate Jon Katz.
15.) This is old news. This was invented by von Neumann and Turing in 1943. Read Cryptonomicon.
16.) Hot grits! In my pants!