Windows-On-Linux Emulator Shootout

securitas writes: "ZDNet has posted a comparative review of 5 Windows-on-Linux emulators from VMware (2), NeTraverse, WinToNet and Wine." The results encountered varied quite a bit -- none of the products are perfect, but it looks like they hit a particularly disappointing time with Wine.

Comments

Re:So which one is faster??

[HeUnique]

The conclusion is pretty simple..

If you want to run your office apps and have Windows 95/98/98SE/ME (not sure about Win ME - anyone?) - then use Win4Lin 3.0

If your app requires even a single call to any DirectX stuff (like full-screen with Direct Draw) - then it won't run on Win4Lin.

Win4Lin run "normal" apps (that doesn't requires DirectX) much faster then VMWare.

Now - if you want to run Windows NT/2000/XP or Another Operating system (Linux) then the only option you have is VMWare - but you'll need lots of memory (which is cheap), and a strong processor. VMWare however - is slower compared to Win4Lin but it runs much more software.

Now - I didn't see they mention it - but if you need to run MULTIPLE VMWare sessions at once, with scripting support (VM1 turns on VM2 to do XYZ and then turns of VM2 etc...) - then you'll need VMWare GSX which got a pretty big price tag - $2500

If you want to run some serious numbers of VM's at once (15,20,30 etc) - then you'll need VMWare ESX - which is an entirly different product (it's bootable VMWare without any hosting OS) - a really strong machine (4 processors minimum), tons of memory (gigabytes), and very fast hard drives and network. You'll get a special console which is Redhat 6.2 + perl scripts to do all the maintaining stuff - and for each user you'll need to install special KVM software (keyboard, video, mouse) - price tag - $11.200 + precentages..