VirtualPC 2004 Versus VMWare 4.5?

BackNBlack writes "Ars Technica has an interesting comparison shootout between Microsoft's VirtualPC 2004 and VMWare Workstation 4.5. Has VirtualPC improved since Microsoft bought it from Connectix? It looks as though VMWare is really the choice of those who can afford it. I'm also a little surprised that Microsoft is not as compatible as it could be, given the competition."

Comments

Features

[mstich]

I've used both and I have to say that Microsoft's Virtual PC is ASS-slow. VMWare is actually usable and has far more features and compatibility.

Re:Features

[XaviorPenguin]

I have not had problems with either program. I had Connectix VPC when it was out and it rocked really hard. It was compatible with almost everything I did. I tried VMWare and it was slow. I tried installing multiple OS's on it and installing them were slower than Connectix.

When Microsoft bought out Connectix, it was a good deal. Microsoft, IMO, made it better. I read at one point that you could not install Linux on Microsoft's product, I did and it worked. I am using M$'s product and it is faster then Connectix. IMO, it is good. I will have to try to find VMWare GSX Server and try that.

Re:Features

[Anonymous Coward]

Not on my 2 GHz Opteron it isn't. I run multiple instances of Linux and *BSD without problems.

Re:Features

[Anonymous Coward]

In Virtual PC Console Options, make sure the "Run Virtual PC at maximum speed" option is selected. This is the most common performance issue we usually find in Virtual PC.

Re:Features

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as running windows is concerned, I'm going to disagree with the poster. Microsoft's virtual PC does an excellent job running all versions of windows I've thrown at it. What impressed me most, however, was how it was used at a Microsoft seminar I attended. The presenter had 4 copies of server 2003 running simultaneously, creating a little virtual network on his laptop to demonstrate features in exchange server. Granted the laptop had 2 gigs of memory but all instances of 2003 server were quick and responsive.

You could always try it for yourself. There's a 45 day free trail available. You don't even have to register.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/downl oa ds/trial.mspx

Re:Features

[faragon]

May be it is slow, but is the only one if you want to run Lynx OS (at least since version 5, before the MS era), with both VGA and ethernet support (VMWare crashes).

Re:Features

[devilspgd]

Microsoft doesn't provide support (read: technical support) for running Linux under MSVPC, but it works fine.

Re:Features

[xWakawaka]

For those interested in the VM market space, the real interesting product is not Microsoft's revision of VPC, but Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. You can download RC1 free on their site. It runs on Server 2003 (also runs on XP, but slower) and it is *MUCH* faster than you think it is going to be. Plus the virtual layer 2 networking is impressive and tight.

A pleasant surprise.

Re:Features

[Malc]

It took six hours to install Windows XP Pro SP1 under VPC. It probably took an hour under VMWare. VPC just seems to take a long long time to do anything, although it doesn't hit the CPU and hard drive as hard as VMWare does.

VPC is all eye-candy. This review was very poor - the bias of the author was clear from the start.

Re:Features

[BerntB]

Microsoft doesn't provide support (read: technical support) for running Linux under MSVPC, but it works fine.

It probably will continue to work for a while, too... Let me tell you about a case where Microsoft was "strategically incompetent".

Word 6 (and the rest of Office) for Mac was total garbage. Running a PC emulator on the Mac and use the Win version of Office was literally as fast -- and more stable.

This is also the point when i lost all trust in the computer media. The Mac press didn't give that POS bad reviews -- but the columnists screamed bloody murder, since they had the freedom to write what they wanted.

Gates promised that they were on the problem and would fix it. The updated version didn't work much better.

Jobs did a deal when he came back to Apple and traded not suing Microsoft (code theft of quicktime code) for among other things a functioning Office and a statement of support.

(It's possible Word 6 was incompetence that just happened to come at a bad time for Apple. That assumption would have been probable for some other company than M-soft.)

BTW: Is there a good site that collects all these stories about Microsoft's backstabbing, astroturfing, etc, etc? I looked in google some time ago but didn't find anything.

Re:Features

[Anonymous Coward]

VirtualPC is more compatible. VMWare only really works with the more popular/well known OSs like Windows, Linux, NetWare (although I had quite a few problem trying to run certain versions of NetWare under VMWare), OS/2 and DOS.
It won't however run BeOS and QNX and most other less known OSs and toy OSs.
Can't say I've had any problems getting any of those to run on VirtualPC though.

Re:Features

[AstroDrabb]

I guess you didn't read this article? VMWare spanks the pants off of MS Virtual PC for speed. Look at the benchmarks. Also, the latest version from MS has problems with Red Hat 9 and Fedora Core, so it is only a matter of time before MS Virtual PC only runs MS OSes. VMWare also runs on far more platforms and runs _far_ more platforms then MS Virtual PC. The broader OS support and the _far_ superior speed of VMWare makes it a no brain-er on which to pick.

Re:Features

[agallagh42]

"I've used both and I have to say that Microsoft's Virtual PC is ASS-slow. VMWare is actually usable and has far more features and compatibility."

Actually, once you set the priority on VPC properly it's pretty close to the same performance as VMWare. The most important differences are as follows:

1. Memory support goes to VPC. VPC supports 4GB of RAM in the host machine that can all be assigned to virtual machines (but you have to keep enough free for the host machine to run, of course). VMWare can only assign a total of 1GB of RAM to all running virtual machines, regardless how much actual RAM you have.

2. Snapshot support goes to VMWare. In VMWare, you can take a snapshot at any time, even when the virtual machine is running, and restore to that exact state within a few seconds. VPC requires you to shut down the virtual machine before you can take a snapshot.

Other than those two items, they're pretty much equal (there are minor differences in how the virtual networking works as well, but that's not as important in my opinion). They have quite different interfaces, but pretty much all the features are there in both. You just have to decide which of those two items is more important to you. For me, number two is a bigger deal, so I use VMWare.

Re:Features

[Anonymous Coward]

The Mac press didn't give that POS bad reviews -- but the columnists screamed bloody murder, since they had the freedom to write what they wanted.

I'm confused.

If the columnists aren't Mac press, who the hell are they? They're in a trade/industry/computer magazine, they're part of the press. Seriously.

One big reason for Word 6's horrific performance was a practice within Microsoft at the time to share as much code as possible between Mac & PC versions. Word 6 was the first to do this and was, verbatim, mostly the exact same code from the Windows version (which itself was pretty damned pathetic). It ran through a really bizaare and expensive ($5000+) Microsoft C/C++ plugin to parse Windows code, spit out Macintosh code, and then pass it off to a dedicated Mac for compiling.

We got a version of that tool through MSDN contacts (I don't think it was ever part of the standard MSDN library) and tried to see if we could make a useable game port out of it. It was night and day between the existing, half-baked, incomplete, buggy, Mac port that was already underway, and the "finished" Mac version regurgitated by Microsoft's tool. MS's tool was buggier, slower, less compatible, you name it, in every way worse than the incomplete game that was worked on by hand.

That plugin died a horrible death and nobody outside of some jackass in Microsoft, who headed up the project, was sorry to see it go.

Newer versions of Mac Word have shared very little code with the Windows version. Newer versions of Mac Word aren't actually all that bad, though they're still bloated and clunky in many ways.

Re:Features

[BerntB]

If the columnists aren't Mac press, who the hell are they? They're in a trade/industry/computer magazine, they're part of the press. Seriously.

Was the trivial distinction that unclear?!

OK. I maybe should have written:
"The only articles in the computer press that was upset about the quality and speed of that Office version were the columnists -- they had contracts that said that they could write what they wanted. This was when I became a total cynic regarding the computer media's integrity."

Clear enough?

I'm aware of the background story at Microsoft. As I wrote -- I might believe a foulup (using totally untested tools that generated code for a shipping version) the most probable answer for a company with business morals. Even if it happened to knecap a competitor, like here (was not a good time for more problems at Apple).

You don't have a link to a good site about Microsoft business dealings? Should be popular, if anyone has done it?

VMware runs on linux

[Anonymous Crowhead]

For me, that is all that matters.

Re:VMware runs on linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that is great.

On the other hand, it proves that you have never worked in the Real World. You are probably at a state-owned University where performance and usability matters.

Re:VMware runs on linux

[Anonymous Coward]

VMware runs on linux....
BUT, VPC runs on osX.

Re:VMware runs on linux

[Anonymous Crowhead]

On the other hand, it proves that you have never worked in the Real World.

I develop a commercial web based application that runs on Linux. I have used VMWare daily for 3 years so that I can test on several Windows platforms without having multiple machines or a kvm at my desk. I just ctrl-tab to another desktop and there is Windows XP or 2000 or 98 or whatever else I am running at the time.

Re:VMware runs on linux

[Anonymous Coward]

You are probably at a state-owned University where performance and usability matters.

Nah, a state-owned University where they crank out code that no one cares about, much less uses...

Why not integrate it into Windows ?

[Anonymous Coward]

It will finally put an end to these 3rd party client apps

Re:Why not integrate it into Windows ?

[smooth wombat]

You mean like IE is integratd into the OS? Wouldn't want a third-party browser to be used on a Micorsoft OS now would we?

What is it with people that want everything integrated into the OS? Do you want your radio integrated into your car so that you can't remove it?

Re:Why not integrate it into Windows ?

[Short Circuit]

When they bought VirtualPC, that's exactly what I thought they would do. And I still think so.

They're going to wait for Longhorn, though, as being able to run other operating systems from within Windows would be a major coup for them. There'd be no reason for people to install over it...People interested in trying other operating systems will simply install inside the VM, and most probably won't get around to wiping off the host OS.

On the other hand, if Microsoft software becomes tied to the hardware tightly enough, the fact that users can run other operating systems from within Windows would be a significant defense for the next time they wind up in court on charges of antitrust or the like.

Re:Why not integrate it into Windows ?

[riscthis]

They're going to wait for Longhorn, though, as being able to run other operating systems from within Windows would be a major coup for them. There'd be no reason for people to install over it...People interested in trying other operating systems will simply install inside the VM, and most probably won't get around to wiping off the host OS.

On the other hand, if Microsoft software becomes tied to the hardware tightly enough, the fact that users can run other operating systems from within Windows would be a significant defense for the next time they wind up in court on charges of antitrust or the like.

Not only that, but they can run previous versions of Windows -- or at least some of the sub-systems -- under Longhorn, thereby allowing backwards compatibility without having to design it directly into Longhorn's own APIs. (Like Apple did when they went to OS X, I believe).

They could also the technology for sandboxing "untrusted" applications and isolate them from the main system.

Re:Why not integrate it into Windows ?

[andreyw]

Choice.

Integrating the connectix product into Windows would mean the death of VMWare, which is IMO a much more superior product.

Its about choice. Its about avoiding vendor lock-in.

Re:Why not integrate it into Windows ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you want your radio integrated into your car so that you can't remove it?

It is. Only a specific model of Delco radio will fit my dashboard. Technically it can be replaced but most people would need a professional to do the job.

Re:Why not integrate it into Windows ?

[MicktheMech]

No, but I'd certainly like to have a radio pre-installed when I drive the car off the lot. Even if it's a PoS, you can replace it later.

Re:Why not integrate it into Windows ?

[ScytheBlade1]

It's called "lawsuits". Doing this would make VMWare essential useless. Anti-competition.

MS would be screwed if that did that.

Re:Why not integrate it into Windows ?

[joshmccormack]

Doing this [integrating VirtualPC into Windows] would make VMWare essential useless.

No. You could still use VMWare to run Windows on Linux, or other x86 OSes on Linux.

Also, is the belief that Windows will integrate VirtualPC basically as is into their OS? I doubt that. I can picture them making it into a compatibility layer that allows muliple OSes to run on some level, but I doubt it would intentionally be noticeable, and they may try to control it to the point that everything still looks like it's an XP or whatever app.

Re:Why not integrate it into Windows ?

[smooth wombat]

I didn't say you could remove the radio. If something is integrated you can't remove it. Think of an integrated sound card on a motherboard. You can't remove it, can you?

Yes, you can install a second sound card (assuming an open slot) but the original sound card is still there.

The same would apply in this case. Having the software integrated into the OS opens a whole host of other problems. Again, look at IE and its integration at why this is not a good thing.

Re:Why not integrate it into Windows ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Mozilla useless? WinAMP? MS would likely be screwed in court if they tried it, but it wouldn't make VMWare useless, it would make their job a hell of a lot harder.

Re:Why not integrate it into Windows ?

[Phroggy]

Not only that, but they can run previous versions of Windows -- or at least some of the sub-systems -- under Longhorn, thereby allowing backwards compatibility without having to design it directly into Longhorn's own APIs. (Like Apple did when they went to OS X, I believe).

Just to clarify, what Apple did was make these available:

1) A complete API set called Cocoa, derived from NeXTStep (which GNUStep is also based on)
2) Another complete API called Carbon, derived from the classic Mac OS Toolbox with some things taken out (e.g. stuff that directly touches the hardware) and some new things added in
3) CarbonLib for classic Mac OS, which is the new things added as mentioned above. Carbon applications can, in theory, run completely natively on either Mac OS X or Mac OS 9 with CarbonLib.
4) Classic is an emulation environment that runs on Mac OS X and boots Mac OS 9 inside the emulator. It's integrated into the OS so it doesn't run inside a window (except while booting), things like drag&drop between native and emulated apps works, and the Mac OS 9 Finder doesn't run. Any classic Mac OS apps that aren't Carbon-compatible, and don't try to touch the hardware too much, should work fine inside Classic, because it's really a hacked up Mac OS 9.

Owning VirtualPC would allow Microsoft to implement an emulation layer similar to Classic on Mac OS X. To make it appear seamless to the user would require quite a bit of hacking, of course.

Re:Why not integrate it into Windows ?

[devilspgd]

The sandboxing functionality is, in my opinion, the most important, and likely the excuse they'll use in court when VMWare tries to go after MS for integrating something like this into the OS.

Re:Why not integrate it into Windows ?

[Zeal17]

What people seem to be forgetting is that VirtualPC is a pentium emulator for the PowerPC chip. If MS wanted to do something like 'classic' they would not have to emulate the processor. What they COULD do with VirtualPC is write a version of windows that would run on a PowerPC chip, but still be backwards compatible with old versions of Windows, via emulation. If all they wanted to do was run an old version of windows inside of the current OS, it would be much simpler, and faster, to not go as in depth as a full processor emulator.

Re:Why not integrate it into Windows ?

[drinkypoo]

I think it is highly likely if not intensely probable that Microsoft will eventually use a virtualization technology as a core component of a server product. I do not think it is entirely unlikely that they might implement some part of it as some portion of even a home version of Windows at some point. If it became the basis of a core windows subsystem, which is a buzzword for being hooked into basically every major library pretty tightly, which in itself is so nearly a buzzword as to defy logical examination, it could provide a sort of guaranteed backwards compatibility which could nonetheless contain any kind of software fault without crashing the entire operating system.

A lightweight version of windows could be started for every application run by windows, which would run on its own virtual machine. This need only be done (probably automatically) by applications which were causing problems when running on the native version of windows, and furthermore single virtual machines could serve multiple processes. Otherwise, all interfaces to specific portions of the system would be emulated by systems which would be running in the same virtual machine.

Mind you, I'm not sure that Microsoft is really the company to bring a system like this to a glorious realization, but it does seem like it would be a highly valuable idea. The system could easily be programmed to learn which processes most benefit from existing inside the same virtual machine and which run best and fastest on the underlying operating system. Naturally there would be a great many hints given to the system, which would really not have to be very complicated overall. Problem applications could be given their own VM as a rule and then they would never hurt anything but themselves (provided other applications handled erroneous input logically, but the operating system can be made to handle that reasonably enough. In most cases. Again, not sure they're the guys to do this. I guess I'm sounding bigoted but Microsoft has done some pretty questionable stuff. I'm pretty impressed with windows in general but my explorer just died again about an hour ago and I miss my motherboard monitors, so I guess I'm going to have to go kill and restart the stupid thing.

Anyway now that I've wanked over what is probably the least efficient way to go about things, consider that the minimum requirements for longhorn on x86-64 (the direction I'm planning to head, anyway) are expected to be in the neighborhood of half a gigabyte, and you are definitely going to need a 32MB graphics card to boot. This means that Microsoft is planning for people to have 768-1024MB of system memory.

If you have that much ram, what's a quarter of a gigabyte to run some virtual machines?

Re:Why not integrate it into Windows ?

[Anonymous Coward]

They could also the technology for sandboxing "untrusted" applications and isolate them from the main system.

Or they could learn about security and not use hacks like this.

Re:Why not integrate it into Windows ?

[mdamaged]

Modded 'Interesting'? This is flamebait at best.

Re:Why not integrate it into Windows ?

[Lacutis]

"Yes, you can install a second sound card (assuming an open slot) but the original sound card is still there."

You mean just like my motherboard?

My motherboard also has an onboard nic, which I like a lot.

Integration isn't always evil.

Re:Why not integrate it into Windows ?

[Lacutis]

Except you don't really know what you are talking about.

VirtualPC was originally a POWER PC program that emulated an X86 environment, not the other way around.

Microsoft distributes it as an X86 program that emulates a X86 Environment.

Re:Why not integrate it into Windows ?

[Phroggy]

Actually, he has a very interesting point. If the direction Microsoft wants to go in the future is not down an x86-compatible path, VirtualPC frees them from the backwards compatibility nightmare - not just the nightmare of moving to a significantly different operating system, but the nightmare of moving to a new CPU architecture. Microsoft could release a (for example) PowerPC version of Windows, which would run on PowerPC hardware, running native Win/PPC apps, with legacy Win32/x86 apps running alongside them in emulation. Not that they'd be likely to choose PowerPC, but Intel and AMD would probably love to move to a better RISC architecture of their own, and with Microsoft's support, it could be done.

There was a rumor that Microsoft was considering supporting original XBox games (x86-based) on the XBox Next (PowerPC-based), using VirtualPC to accomplish it.

Very interesting possibilities.

Re:Why not integrate it into Windows ?

[chamalulu]

Next patent application coming out of redmond:
When user/software/agent trying to do anything, system responds "No, you can not!" or maybe just "Error loading DLL.".
If they'd get such a patent I promise not to infringe.

GSX Server

[IgorMrBean]

VmWare has a lot of other products, like GSX servers, which are really cool it lets you run multiple os as "services", so you don't need to login to start manually each vmos also, new cool products, in collaboration with ibm, will offer vmware as the OS of the machine, so you'll be able to swap server from one blade to another "live"

Re:GSX Server

[bwhaley]

Running multiple guest OS's as a service is key; however, GSX costs a ton.. what I've done instead is use virtual PC as a scheduled task. You can schedule it to start as system boot. It then essentially runs in the background. The major downside to this is that you can't stop and start it like a service, and you can't bring it to the foreground without ending the process and restarting it.

This is probably possible with vmware too, though I haven't tried it...

Re:GSX Server

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtual Server runs everything as services too, and you access it via Terminal Services/Web Interface. Of course that's going to cost a bomb.

Re:GSX Server

[Huh?]

You can run VM's as a service in VMWare Workstaion, it just takes a little 'extra' effort. Have a look here for a nice 'howto'.

VMWare + Xinerama

[Television Set]

I really like VMWare. I have a dual monitor setup with Gnome on X.Org with Xinerama, and VMWare works quite well in that setup for running a virtual Windows XP box. I do alot of my Dreamweaver stuff on that. What it ends up looking like, with VMWare/XP running in full screen mode, is two computers, with Gnome on one and XP on the other. All I gotta do is ctl-alt and move the mouse over to deal with stuff on the host machine.

Re:VMWare + Xinerama

[Anonymous Coward]

Install VMWare Tools.

It will remove the need for ctrl+alt

I run a similar setup with my Area51-m.

My laptop screen runs Gentoo/Linux/Gnome and my 18" ViewSonic running Studio MX/3DS Max/etc

Re:VMWare + Xinerama

[Saeger]

I run VMWare under my SuSE 9.1 desktop primarily for webdev as well. However, I do the actual dev under linux with vi and Quanta, and then use the WinXP guest OS for checking browser compatibility with all versions of IE (installed at the same time), FireFox, Netscape, Mozilla, and Opera. Can't test for the Mac though.

Also, as the previous poster said, once you've installed the VMWare Tools, you don't need to press and release Ctrl+Alt in order to change the VMWare window focus; you can seemlessly move your mouse between the guest and host OS's (among other functionality).

Re:VMWare + Xinerama

[Television Set]

When I have it in full screen mode (my preference) the ability to move my mouse seamlessly is lost, oddly enough, with VMWare tools installed. When I have it in a window, the mouse effect works fine. This is with the 4.5.88xx build under Gentoo Linux with kernel 2.6.7...

Re:VMWare + Xinerama

[Anonymous Coward]

You can run dreamweaverMX and flashMX on CrossOverOffice Pro 3.0 ;)

Re:VMWare + Xinerama

[mcrbids]

I have a dual monitor setup with Gnome on X.Org with Xinerama, and VMWare works quite well in that setup for running a virtual Windows XP box.

Something very similar here. I have a Linux Laptop with dual-head setup in X. I use KDE.

The most recent VMWare (4.x) works very nicely in Fedora Core 1, and has tabs for VMs. With 1.5 GB of RAM in the laptop, I can run 3-4 VMs simultaneously, and switch between them with the ease of tabs in Moz on the host OS.

It's easy, fast, stable, and secure. What's not to like?

4.x has support for shared folders, though I've never used it. When I used 3.x, I set up a bunch of scripts based around SMBmount, and rather than re-do all that, I just use Samba.

Seriously, if you are developing software, this setup simply kicks some serious ass.

Re:VMWare + Xinerama

[mattyrobinson69]

since vmware 4 you dont even have to press control and alt. just install the vmware tools in the guest os and the mouse moves in and out like a normal window. very cool software.

Re:VMWare + Xinerama

[Anonymous Coward]

Please file an SR with VMware.

I use both... VMWare is superior

[Dejohn]

VMWare is superior in all regards. I've had significant problems running Linux under Virtual PC where VMWare handles it without any problems at all. Also, I've found that VMWare has drivers for most host operating systems to enable drive sharing, video, and sound. VirtualPC's guest os driver set is pretty bad. Virtual PC is a lot cheaper (free for us, as Solution Providers) but if I ever really need to get something done, VMWare is the only way to go.

OS/2 pwns :-P

[erotic_pie]

where I work we use Virtual PC 2004 because it can run OS/2 Warp, and as far as I know, OS/2 doesn't run on VMWare

Re:OS/2 pwns :-P

[Dejohn]

Wow... what are you running OS/2 for? As far as I know, only ancient voicemail systems and weird proprietary stuff are the only reason to keep it around. Then again, it would be cool to pull out my old Warp CDs and fire up my old OS/2 BBS with the Gcomm third party serial drivers :) Ahh... the bad old days...

Re:OS/2 pwns :-P

[Short Circuit]

I know an ISP that still uses Worldgroup(on DOS) for authentication. (Not the one I worked at, though.) They used to run about thirty dial-up lines through a Galactibox.

The power supply in their original galactibox blew up. (That happens when you run thirty 14400kbps external modems on six Galacticards in a Galactibox that was only designed to handle the heat of eight modems. (Especially considering the Galacticards were only intended to run 9600 baud modems.))

They swapped the old box with a new Galactibox, left the cover off, and had a fan blowing on it 24x7. They finally switched to a pair of terminal servers a couple years ago.

Re:OS/2 pwns :-P

[Anonymous Coward]

I really like playing around with OS/2 Warp ever since it went public-domain...

Re:OS/2 pwns :-P

[erotic_pie]

some old in-house software we produced a while back, we should have a new version that will run on windows within the next couple of years. God bless the military on the cutting edge of technology, lol.

Re:OS/2 pwns :-P

[devilspgd]

VPC runs OS/2 just fine.

Re:OS/2 pwns :-P

[mdamaged]

Check this article out, it addresses OS/2 apparently it can.

http://www.os2ezine.com/v5n1/vmware3.html

VMWare

[JohnGrahamCumming]

Personally use VMWare with the following Virtual Machines:

1. Windows 2000
2. SuSe Linux 8.0
3. Solaris 9 for x86

And my real OS is SuSE Linux 8.0. With that configuration in my laptop I can go anywhere with the major operating systems that my company has to support.

John.

My personal review

[Stonent1]

Ok mine's slightly different, I've used the previous version of Virtual PC and VMware 3.1. I found Linux easier to install on Virtual PC. First of all since Virtual PC emulates a real video card (s3 Trio64 iirc) the Vesa framebuffer works. You can use the bootsplash kernel patch or just have a high resolution console. The network card was a DEC Tulip as well which is well supported. For whatever reason the fake video card in VMware always seems to have some issues working in my experience. The network card is an AMD PCnet32 card which seems equally well supported (even solaris picks it up). The feature that is in VMware that I really missed in Virtual PC was the ability to boot from real hard drives. If you dual boot windows and linux, you could boot into windows and then boot up your linux partition as well. Both offerred excelent performance provided you had enough ram. VMware 3.1 though seems to crash with 2.6 series kernels but I suspect that has been fixed in newer versions. So if I were VMware, I'd offer VESA compatable video card rather than their made up one.

Re:My personal review

[Stonent1]

Oh as well I agree with the Ars review, the USB and SCSI passthrough are really nice.

Re:My personal review

[Anonymous Coward]

The video card in VMware is a VESA card.

I don't know if it's always been like that or if it's just a 4.x series thing but I've never had problems running VESA or framebuffer stuff (bootsplash, and I run a 1600x1200 console).

Re:My personal review

[Anonymous Coward]

probably not in the windows version, but the OS X version of Virtual PC can mount seperate partitions, mostly because of the way OS X handles partitions. since partitions are mapped as files in /dev there's nothing stopping you from capturing one of those like you'd capture any disk image.

Re:My personal review

[Stonent1]

It's a nice feature for fixing another computer. You can install a hard drive and try to boot it in VMware or even run disk utilities on it. Also if you need to look up stuff on the internet while you're working on it, you don't have to keep switching between drives.

Re:My personal review

[Curtman]

The feature that is in VMware that I really missed in Virtual PC was the ability to boot from real hard drives

Whats the trick to not screwing up your Windows partition when you do that? I tried all kinds of things, but it would always bugger up the device settings in Windows on the next real-boot. I tried that 'Hardware Profiles' thing, but surprisingly that always left me with some stupid message about not being able to determine which hardware profile you were using. How it can't tell the difference between VMware and my real hardware is something I just just don't understand. Have they fixed that since Win98?

Neither are that great

[bwhaley]

I have used both of these extensively. I have had more problems with VMWare than with Virtual PC, but both have issues. Both have stability problems, and vmware is full of inconsistencies; what works in one version may or may not work in another. For example, RedHat EL WS v3 will install only in text mode in VMWare 4.5.2, but 4.5.1 will install only in graphical mode. SuSe 9.1 Pro simply won't install, at least when I first tried it 2 or 3 months ago, right when SuSe 9.1 pro came out. VMWare customer support is TERRIBLE; there is supposed to be 30 days support included. I emailed them several times and never got a response at all. The community forums are semi-useful, though it has far more questions than answers.

I would love to see a new competitor in this market.

Re:Neither are that great

[Curtman]

I would love to see a new competitor in this market.

I would love see Bochs get to a point where it can seriously challenge these products. Waiting for VMWare to fix some stupid bug is very very aggravating. Virtual PC's are too much of a PITA in my experience.

Re:Neither are that great

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm... Never heard about Qemu ??

Re:Neither are that great

[Curtman]

No I hadn't. But thanks for link. :(

Re:Neither are that great

[JAD lifter]

I don't know what you are using VMware for, you may very well be much more demanding of it than I am. Personally I use VMware running on Win2K (1.1Ghz Athlon, 1024MB sdram) to mess around with my own little virtual network consisting of an Exchange server, a couple linux installs and a couple XP pro installs all running at once.

When all these OS's are running at once it is kind of slow but other than that the only two problems that I've had are that everytime I try to install Solaris x86 the install hangs and an older version of Redhat (7.3?) would only install in text mode. But to be honest I only use VMware as a toy and not for business use so these problems are not that big a deal for me. As a toy to mess around with I find VMware to be really enjoyable.

Re:Neither are that great

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.colinux.org/ is working hard on making both obsolete for running Linux on Windows.

Re:Neither are that great

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not your choice of VMs it is your choice of crappy distributions (RH and SuSe) that is failing you.

Re:Neither are that great

[kscguru]

Bochs is a full-out emulator; these products are virtual machines (e.g. they run almost all code natively). Bochs will NEVER match them in terms of performance - the rule of thumb is that emulation = 10x speed drop at least, and Bochs is running ~15-20x now. Virtual machines run at almost native speed. And anyways, I've dealt with the Bochs codebase; it's already incredibly tuned, rather unextensible, and doesn't have support for anything beyond a 486-class machine. (Yes it emulates higher processors, but the rest of the system hardware is archaic by today's standards).

The only open-source software in the same performance ballpark is QEMU, which does JIT x86 binary translation. It's about as mature as ... VMware was 5 years ago.

Not only that..

[benzapp]

but VirtualPC has something along the line of the VMWare tools for OS/2. That is a nifty feature.

Different

[Anonymous Coward]

VMWARE is slow as hell.. VirtualPC is actually quite fast. The *only* reason I don't use VirtualPC is because you can't boot off a raw hd partition but are rather limited to using some image file.....

I think Connectix is a great company that produced quality software. Virtual Game Station anyone? pretty damn good PSX emulator for its time.

Too bad microsoft had to buy out and essentially kill VirtualPC.. anyone notice how FreeBSD isn't even a guest operating system anymore?

Re:Different

[Anonymous Coward]

VMware, slow? bwahahaha... funny how I can run 2 VMware instances on my lowly 450 Mhz Celeron machine without any problems at all.

Or did you try it with 64 megs or RAM or something?

go back to your cave, moran

Re:Different

[devilspgd]

FreeBSD isn't listed in the options, but all those options really do is preset a bunch of configuration settings. You can install whatever OS you like, the majority of what worked under Connectix works fine under MSVPC too.

What I would really like to see...

[march]

I've been using VMWare for years now. Been through some rough times, but basically, it really rocks.

I run VMWare on a linux box so I can have access to the dreaded windows apps. What I would really like to see is something akin to Exceed, where X windows come up on my Windows desktop as Windows windows. In other words, free the Windows windows from the VMWare container and let them roam free on my linux desktop. Sort of like wine, but more stable.

(Heh... let's see how many times you can use "windows" in one sentence!)

Re:What I would really like to see...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not use exceed and do that then? Set up your VM so it can network with the host, ssh in and X-forward your heart out?

Re:What I would really like to see...

[drinkypoo]

In other words, you need cygwin. Run the cygwin installer from cygwin.com and set the "X11" part to "install", go into editors and turn off all the emacs packages :) and then click install. Good luck finding a fast mirror, it is possible however. Once you have cygwin installed, run a cygwin shell to set up your environment. Now create a shortcut which runs the following:

C:\CYGWIN\usr\X11R6\bin\run.exe XWin.exe -multiwindow -clipboard

This runs the X server in a rootless mode that does not require a window manager (Windows is your window manager - this instructs the X server to in turn instruct windows to draw decorations around your X client windows) and which performs clipboard integration. There are some other switches you can set, see man XWin for more information. In particular people with multiple displays will want to set another switch to support that, and there is also a switch to specify that all clipboard contents should be 8 bit (no unicode support.) It's not the fastest nor the best* X server out there, but it certainly does the job. If you are going to be running X clients locally, which you probably will if you install cygwin, you will want to add "DISPLAY=localhost:0" to your environment.

* Actually, cygwin's X server might have recently become the best X server around. It uses directdraw to draw windows, it properly handles the clipboard now which X-Win32 still can't seem to get right after an update they explicitly claimed would solve my clipboard problem, and it uses standard X tools like xhost for management.

Re:What I would really like to see...

[march]

Yes, when I am forced to use Windows, cygwin is right there with me. But, my point was that I'm using linux and I want to display my Windows apps in X windows. Similar to wine, but with the stability of VMWare.

Re:What I would really like to see...

[drinkypoo]

Oh, I see. Well, there is no such thing, but you can use rdesktop to access a windows desktop in a window from linux. Then again, you're doing that already, with vmware :)

Re:What I would really like to see...

[Curtman]

You can share single application windows with VNC. rdesktop has potential to support that if it doesn't already. But that's the beauty of X11, network transparency is built into the protocol.

Re:What I would really like to see...

[drinkypoo]

Hate to reply twice to one comment but, I just now reread your original comment and you specifically said you wanted a system in which "X windows come up on my Windows desktop as Windows windows". Then you contradicted it later but I didn't read that far down. It looks like you meant to say something like Exceed, where X windows come up as windows windows, but the opposite, but you didn't :)

Re:What I would really like to see...

[cuban321]

Try Citrix, their application publishing works good.

Re:What I would really like to see...

[march]

Sorry it was confusing... I was looking for the linux anology of exceed for windows which is what I said. But, it is confusing with the word "windows" so many times in one paragraph. In any case, since I use windows too, your tip for run.exe (which I didn't know about) is definitely useful.

Sometimes, confusion is good. :-)

UML

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah.. user mode linux is the only possible choice.

Win4Lin is dead, so what are the Linux options?

[Just Some Guy]

I need to run a very short list of apps under Linux, namely Quickbooks Pro 2002 (don't say Wine - not even Codeweavers has gotten this particular program to work). I'd like to use a Free solution, but I'd settle for a non-Free program since it would be replacing a non-Free Windows 2000 machine that I keep around specifically for this purpose. Vmware seems to work pretty well, but at $189 it's a little too non-gratis for my purposes.

Win4Lin is no longer for sale. I base this on the fact that I wrote to them two months ago to ask about an educational discount so that I could buy a copy for my kids to use to play Reader Rabbit. A week later, I got a trouble ticket notification but it said that I have to be a registered user to access it. I've since written to support@netraverse.com and Cc:'ed sales@ and education@ as recently as July 19 but have still received to reply whatsoever. In other words, Netraverse is no longer accepting solicitations to buy their product, so I'm writing them off as dead (and at this point I would refuse to buy from them anyway).

So, are there any Free or reasonably-priced emulators that can get, say, a Windows 98 image running at a speed useful for office-type applications on a gigahertz class system? If not, I may bite the bullet and buy Vmware, but my budget is really hoping for something cheaper.

Re:Win4Lin is dead, so what are the Linux options?

[isolation]

If you want to get it to work under CrossOver try here.

http://www.codeweavers.com/site/compatibility/br ow se/name?app_id=189

Re:Win4Lin is dead, so what are the Linux options?

[cpenner461]

VMWare is available with an educational discount, can't remember what I paid for it a while back, but it was considerably cheaper than the list...

Re:Win4Lin is dead, so what are the Linux options?

[Anonymous Coward]

Win4Lin is dead

What the hell are you talking about??? What's wrong with the BUY link on this page? It's $89 bucks, you can't even get the educational version of VMWare for that price. Beisdes, they're rolling out support for W2K this fall without resorting to CPU intensive hardware emulation.

Anyhow, Bochs is your only "free" option to get W98 running. I don't know what the performance will be like, I've never used it.

Re:Win4Lin is dead, so what are the Linux options?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a windows app I need to run at home for work, but I have sworn off windows at home. Along came qemu http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/. I got windows 98 installed under it VERY EASILY. It is free and open source. This site http://dad-answers.com/qemu/howto/qemu-win98-howto .html is a very decent guide to getting started with qemu.

Re:Win4Lin is dead, so what are the Linux options?

[Anonymous Coward]

You _might_ try Bochs (http://bochs.sourceforge.net/). It is is an x86 processor emulator, so it is really, really slow compared to VMWare or VirtualPC (which use the processor directly). But, if you use a fast machine and an old Windows install, it _might_ work for you. I used it in a Windows host with Linux (without X), and it worked well enough for me to do a lot of basic things.

Re:Win4Lin is dead, so what are the Linux options?

[deKernel]

Guess I am kinda lucky because it runs just fine with Crossover 3.0 for me, and I didn't have to do anything goofy.

Re:Win4Lin is dead, so what are the Linux options?

[Just Some Guy]

What the hell are you talking about??? What's wrong with the BUY link on this page?

Did you read a single word that I wrote? I wanted to know if I qualified for an educational discount and their sales department has completely ignored my inquiries. That is what's wrong with the buy link on that page - it's a frontend to a company that can't be bothered replying to sales questions.

If they won't answer a question about pricing, do you honestly think they'll care about tech support? Frankly, at this point I've completely written them off.

Re:Win4Lin is dead, so what are the Linux options?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I'm sure their sales department is just busting their ass to reply to some guy who wants an educational discount on an $89 piece of software...LOL

Re:Win4Lin is dead, so what are the Linux options?

[Just Some Guy]

Seriously? Quickbooks Pro 2002 (and later) runs on your system, and not just regular Quickbooks? I'd be happy to find out that I'm wrong about Crossover since I trust them and would buy from them without hesitation.

Re:Win4Lin is dead, so what are the Linux options?

[Anonymous Coward]

From http://www.netraverse.com/products/win4lin50/:

For more information on volume licensing or to purchase Win4Lin for corporate, education or government usage, please contact sales@netraverse.com

Gee, I can't imagine where I got the idea that they'd welcome educational inquiries.

We all know that no real companies offer discounted versions of popular products for low-volume end users. Can you imagine Microsoft making a "Student and Teacher" edition of office, or Apple making an "eMac"? Imagine their sales department just busting their ass to reply to some guy who wants an educational discount...LOL.

No, I stand by my original assertion that Win4Lin is dead. Their sales and support staff certainly no longer exists.

Re:Win4Lin is dead, so what are the Linux options?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, their support isn't terrible considering that it's included in the price of the product. They're pretty good about upgrades too. It looks like VMWare dropped their prices a bit recently. The last time I saw it, the eductional version was $129. Win4Lin is $89. Anyhow, I don't work for either of these guys but I do have both their products. VMWare is cool tech and runs pretty much any flavor of Win, but it's heavy on the CPU. Unless you have a cranked up machine, you won't enjoy it much. Win4Lin is comparatively light weight but it only runs Win98. Personally, I use W4L more often than VMW because it "boots" Win98 in about 3 seconds flat and imposes no more load than a "regluar" program would on my system. Anyhow, I don't work for either of those companies. Another thing you need to consider is if "Reader Rabbit" uses DX, I'm assuming it's a game-style program. If it does, neither W4L or VMW will work unless it's plain 2D DX. You *might* be able to get it going under Wine with all the new DX work they've done there.

Re:Win4Lin is dead, so what are the Linux options?

[Anomalous Cowturd]

Well, I think the heart of the problem is that you were trying to cadge an educational discount so your kid could run a teaching program. Since educational discounts are generally given to schools and the like, I imagine the folks at Win4Lin put your request into the "Yeah, right" pile.

Sure, it's unprofessional of them to just ignore you, and I agree that they should have gotten back to you with at least a simple "No", but you can't really have expected them to take you too seriously, can you?

Re:Win4Lin is dead, so what are the Linux options?

[Just Some Guy]

but you can't really have expected them to take you too seriously, can you?

Absolutely so. On their site they specifically list a way to ask about educational discounts, so it's not like I was inventing a reason to pay less than everyone else.

Beyond that, though, I'm sure they have to have a rather tiny market. I'm sure that Sun could afford quite a few missed sales of this size, but I can't imagine that Netraverse can.

Finally, if my boss found out that I ignored a sales inquiry - any sales inquiry - I'd be fired immediately. For all they know, I'm the IT guy of a school system and wanting to try out something for my kid before recommending it to the school board. I'm not, but they wouldn't know since they've never answered a single question.

Re:Win4Lin is dead, so what are the Linux options?

[God of Lemmings]

You _might_ try Bochs, but then you might realize that qemu
blows bochs out of the water when it comes to emulation speed.

http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/benchmarks.h tm l

Re:Win4Lin is dead, so what are the Linux options?

[Anonymous Coward]

$189? For VMWare? That's Too God Damned Much!

Re:Win4Lin is dead, so what are the Linux options?

[Anomalous Cowturd]

Well, if you had represented a school, you probably would have mentioned that up front. I agree completely, though, that they played it all wrong. Not very professional at all.

Re:Win4Lin is dead, so what are the Linux options?

[Anonymous Coward]

qemu is in alpha for the windows platform; anyone wanting to use virtual machines from windows is better off with (in order of precedence) bochs, virtualpc and vmware.

I use and love VMWare

[Anonymous Coward]

and now that the price has dropped ($200) I may even get a legal copy (haha)

Re:I use and love VMWare

[roror]

lol. you suck.

VirtualPC does support ISOs

[Anonymous Coward]

The article is incorrect in stating that VirtualPC 2004 does not support using ISOs as optical drives. It certainly supports this functionality and I use it all of the time. There is a menu item called Capture ISO which lets you select an ISO and mount it like a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive.

I've used both products a good deal, mostly for the purpose of beta testing operating systems and development software. I've not noticed any serious speed differences. VMWare is most definitely more configurable. However I get VirtualPC 2004 for "free" with my MSDN Universal subscription so I can't really beat that.

It should also be noted that while VMWare does run on Linux, VirtualPC runs on Macintosh. It is still supported, although a hardware difference causes it to fail on G5 CPUs because these CPUs do not permit little-endian mode. A new version will be out shortly to accomodate.

Re:VirtualPC does support ISOs

[Anonymous Coward]

VMWare is most definitely more configurable. However I get VirtualPC 2004 for "free" with my MSDN Universal subscription so I can't really beat that.

$2800 for a Universal subscription and you're complaining about a $200 VMware package?

OOOOOOOO KKKKKKKKK...

Slashdot slashdotted?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry - this is clearly OT, but am I the only one who gets "503 Service Unavailable" most of the day today? It seems to go away when I erase the cookie (effectively logging out). I aslo have a paid subscription (don't know if it matters).

Re:Slashdot slashdotted?

[screwedcork]

No I was getting it too... hmmm.....

Re:Slashdot slashdotted?

[gtrubetskoy]

There are some bug reports about it on the slashcode bugtracker, report 1002074 and 1002056. It appears that it primarily affects people using Firefox and Mozilla, while Microsoft IE works fine (conspiracy?).

Re:Slashdot slashdotted?

[Fallen Andy]

DONT PANIC!!! Not so. Just broken server side scripts plus more load or summer brownouts I think....Hey, you should try living here in Athens GR where the brownouts *really* fry parts of machinery no programmer could hose by pulling them out of their sockets...(I wanted a dead memory module. My colleagues machine obliged. One stuck bit. Lovely).

Re:Slashdot slashdotted?

[istewart]

I'm also being affected on Safari as well, so it's not confined to Mozilla products.

Re:Slashdot slashdotted?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a load of bollocks that it works fine on IE. Had 503 Errors yesterday and this morning - IE 6.0.

What about QEMU

[Anonymous Coward]

What about QEMU. http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/

Get ready made images at http://www.freeoszoo.org/.

Re:What about QEMU

[Anonymous Coward]

QEMU emulates the CPU which makes it a much slower approach than VMware, which just abstracts a machine of the same CPU type. But if you need cross-platform then QEMU is what you need.

Re:What about QEMU

[Matheus Villela]

QEMU is an emulator, not a Virtual Machine.

An emulator is too slow compared with a Virtual Machine, so many things that you can do with VMWARE you can't with an emulator.

Re:What about QEMU

[rico_el_diablo]

QEMU works also a virtualizer isn't it?
I've heard that it works quite like vmware with a x86 host CPU.
Maybe i'm wrong...

Re:What about QEMU

[Matheus Villela]

I never heard and never seen this, maybe you are wrong or is something in QEMU roadmap.

If you look at QEMU FAQ you will see this:

"Is QEMU a virtualizer or an emulator ?
QEMU is an emulator. It means that it converts each target CPU instruction into host instructions. Therefore, it emulates any supported target processor on any supported host processor."

Anyway using dynamic translation you can get good speeds at the cpu emulation, not the same as doing total binary translation, but you can get something usable, but not productive(only in special cases like using DOS in QEMU -> you can get better results than DOSBOX and Freedos+DOSEMU)

compatible with Windows is all MS really cares for

[Locutus]

that comment about compatibility in the lead-in kinda surprised me. After all, didn't they purchase VirtualPC because server consolidation was hurting Windows Server sales? They made tons of money when people realized they needed a seperate BOX for each server process run on Windows( they sold more OS licenses ) but now the cats out of the bag and TCO cost are killing them.

So, why would Microsoft care about anything but how this works on Windows and targetted apps? They don't. IMHO.

LoB

Re:Vritual PC vs VM Ware

[Sjobeck]

what the hell are you talking about?

Inside the Bochs?

[theGreater]

Just curious as to why Bochs wasn't even mentioned? I understand it's Beta quality, but it CAN run a significant subset of hardware.

-theGreater.

Re:Inside the Bochs?

[drinkypoo]

Bochs is an emulator, not a virtual machine. The x86 processor is emulated even on x86, rather than being virtualized as it is under vmware or virtual PC. There are reports of plex86 being used with bochs to provide virtualization instead of emulation, but I've never seen anyone package it up or even explain how it is done.

Also, configuring bochs is a major pain in the ass. I have a 2.6 kernel and (I misremember some details but) I tried to use the method recommended for 2.6, had all appropriate support compiled in as far as I could tell, and it still wouldn't work, but the method recommended for 2.4 worked fine. Bochs may fit some needs, but anyone willing to look at virtual pc is surely not someone who will be using bochs.

Re:Inside the Bochs?

[jhoger]

The problem with Bochs is not just that it is beta quality. It is useful for a subclass of things people use VmWare for, like kernel development, some debugging stuff.

But for running windows, and windows apps under Linux on a daily basis it is not your best bet. Bochs is too slow and will probably always be too slow given the attitude I see from folks on their mailing list. They say the focus is on accuracy over usability. But their other problem is they are stuck under the weight of an implementation with a less than optimal pure emulation solution.

If you want Free software your best bet currently is QEMU. It is definitely in its early stages but it already runs circles around Bochs since QEMU dynamically translates the code.

And Plex86 is out of the running since they have chosen only to support running virtual Linux machines.

Re:Inside the Bochs?

[Anonymous Coward]

"...b ut it CAN run a significant subset of hardware."

...slowly.

Re:Inside the Bochs?

[0x0d0a]

Bochs emulates the x86, instead of handing the code off to the x86 a la VMWare.

This makes Bochs slow -- not nearly as usable as VMWare -- but useful for producing an environment for debugging low-level code.

You wouldn't just install Bochs to run software (well, maybe if you wanted an old DOS machine where speed isn't an issue).

VMware will sell your email address to spammers

[monkman]

I used to be pretty happy with VMware, but then I started getting spam directed to the email address I use with them. The only conclusion I can come to is that they sold it to spammers.

Re:VMware will sell your email address to spammers

[Cthefuture]

No way.

I've had an account/e-mail with VMware since they were in beta (many, many years ago) and I've never once gotten spam on that account (not a single spam message other than annoucements from VMware).

Must be from somewhere else.

Re:VMware will sell your email address to spammers

[monkman]

I also wouldn't have expected it, but the evidence indicates otherwise.

I use a unique email address with every company I give my email address to. A few months ago, I started get spam sent to the address I only used with VMWare.

When I mailed the previously helpful sales rep at VMWare about it, I got no response. It seems to me that if they hadn't sold my address, the sales rep would have denied it, especially since I was in the middle of purchasing some licenses.

Re:VMware will sell your email address to spammers

[mattecc]

VMware murders puppies too.

Re:VMware will sell your email address to spammers

[Anonymous Coward]

They clearly do, at least for evaluation copies, from their website:

If you download an evaluation copy of this product or request an evaluation license for this product you are consenting to receive e-mail advertisements and marketing materials from VMware and you are consenting to have VMware share your contact information, and other information you provide to VMware, with third party distributors and resellers who may contact you and send advertisements and marketing materials to you via e-mail. If you do not want to give your consent to receive this e-mail, then do not participate in this evaluation program.

Re:VMware will sell your email address to spammers

[Anonymous Coward]

When I mailed the previously helpful sales rep at VMWare about it, I got no response. It seems to me that if they hadn't sold my address, the sales rep would have denied it, especially since I was in the middle of purchasing some licenses.

You're forgetting option 2:

Your email went into the same bit-bucket that virtually all email sent to VMWare recently goes into.

Their sales follow-ups, their tech support responses (unless you bow to exortion and pay for a support contract), virtually everything... zero response.

Frankly, this is always the first sign of a company going down in flames...

Re:Vritual PC vs VM Ware

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that, Patrick McGooghan, the dwarf butler, and an old "#2" escape from The Village.

Article Text in case of Slashdotting

[gg3po]

Virtual machine shootout: VMware vs. Virtual PC
by Adam Baratz

Introduction
A recent film ignited a new generation of armchair epistemologists when it
proposed that we could be living inside an elaborate computer simulation. While
your philosophy major friends were quick to point out that thinkers since
Descartes have posed the same question, it's likely that none of them ever
considered the converse: what if, unbeknownst to them, our computers were
really running inside other computers for the selfish interests of a special
group of people?
As esoteric as this may sound, such a setup has been in use for a very long
time. Virtual machine software can fool an operating system into thinking it's
running on its own hardware, when in reality it's simply mooching off unused
CPU cycles and RAM. Since the OS is running on its native platform, no
emulation is necessary; virtualization allows it to run with little cost to CPU
performance. However, since display and I/O functions are mapped to slightly
different components (a window or a virtual partition, for example), they incur
a slight performance hit.

Why should I use a VM?
Say you're developing an application under Windows XP. If you need to test your
program on other versions of Windows, virtual machine (VM) software allows you
to run Windows 98 without forcing you to reboot your computer.
Decent VM software also allows some exchange between the host machine (the real
one) and the virtual one. If you encounter a bug, you can switch back to the
host, correct the code, and send an updated executable back for further
testing.
On especially beefy hardware, VMs can be used to simulate complicated network
operations. With the right VM software, you can setup a virtual network to
practice domain management and software rollouts without putting production
equipment on the line.
More robust pieces of software are available for virtualizing servers. VMware
has two products in this category (VMware GSX Server 3 and ESX Server 2).
Microsoft is getting ready to release Virtual Server 2005. The feature sets of
both companies' offerings are more specialized for integration with server
OSes. They also include strong scripting tools for automating VMs.
You can also use VM software to sample alternative operating systems without
committing a dedicated partition to the job. Since VMs can use virtual
partitions (a partition that lives inside a file of dynamic or fixed size), you
don't have to worry about reclaiming any hard drive space lost to
experimentation. Also, since VM software tends to emulate common hardware,
you're less likely to encounter driver issues with an esoteric OS.
Anyone hoping to use VM software to play favorite DOS games will probably be
disappointed. Tests with a couple random games (Terra Nova: Strike Force
Centauri and Gabriel Knight 2) didn't get far beyond their installation.
Simpler games ran reasonably, but people solely interested in gaming should try
something like DOSBox first.
Let's get down to business...
If you're interested in running applications, Virtual PC 2004 (Microsoft;
US129) and VMware Workstation 4.5 (VMware; US189 to download, US199 with
packaging) are both competitive tools for the job. In fact, they're both so
refined that your ultimate purchase decision will be affected more by your own
needs than by any inherent problems with the programs. While general
performance is an important consideration (and easily quantified), your
eventual uses for the software are more important.
Are you planning on rigorous compatibility testing or just sampling other
possible configurations? Do you want pure performance or just an environment
for containing potential accidents? Do you want to run lots of different OSes
or will you stay within the Windows family? Will you need to use special
hardware within your VM or is a generic setup acceptable?
Both pieces of software come with

This is pretty straightforward...

[twalls]

If you want to run anything but Windows on an emulated PC, you will most likely want to avoid using software... sold by the makers of Windows.

Free emulator (and more)

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're interested in a free (as in both beer and speech) emulator with speed that almost rivals VMWare, but runs all in user-mode, I suggest you have a look at QEMU (intentionally no link to not /. yet another site - please do your own Googling, and please don't link directly).

M$ Support

[Anonymous Coward]

The article misses the main point about Virtual PC/Server. Microsoft will support their o/s on their virtual machine. If you have an issue with Windows 2003 on VMWare they will not support that instance until you can prove that it is a Windows issue i.e. stick it on a real box and see if the same problem occurs.
Nice huh?!

Re:M$ Support

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you saying MS should support VMWare?

Should they support my RedHat linux too?

How's that a "main point" to anyone with two brain cells?

Wtf kind of a dumbass post was that?

Re:M$ Support

[aderusha]

This is a troublesome issue for all users of virtual systems in a production environment. You will have the same problem with application support as well - call up tech support for some application and if you even mention that it's running on a virtual system you can pretty much guarentee that they won't help you until you re-create the issue on a non-virtualized system. The same used to be true of applications running under Citrix until so many companies started using it that app developers couldn't get away with not supporting it.

Fortunately, VMWare has an answer to this in the form of a V2P tool (Virtual to Physical). This allows you to transfer an existing virtual environment to a standalone, physical machine. Once you've done this, you can safely volley the issue back to M$ or whomever and they won't have the "but it's running under a virtual machine" crutch that most application tech support companies would use.

Re:M$ Support

[Anonymous Coward]

If only you had those two brain cells...

Use in Tech Suppport?

[no soup for you]

Has anyone used either in a tech-support area? We write windows desktop software, and I'd like to give users the ability to double click on the computer they want to open. Then (here's the tricky part), I want all changes to the computer wiped clean -- no ability for the user to choose to save the changes.

Anyone created something like that using this (or other) products?

Re:Use in Tech Suppport?

[511pf]

VMWare - Nonpersistent Disk Mode Changes to disks in nonpersistent mode are not saved to the disks, but are lost when the virtual machine is powered off or reset. Nonpersistent mode is convenient for people who always want to start with a virtual machine in the same state. Example uses include providing known environments for software test and technical support users as well as doing demonstrations of software.

Re:Use in Tech Suppport?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually we have. We run all versions of windows where I work and in the past we had to have multiple boxes, one for each OS we support. Then I came up with the idea of using VMWARE and installing it on 3 computers this way we can have 3 computers with all the OSES we need.

What we do is this. We configure the computer and install VMWARE and the guest OSES. Then we copy the virutal machine directories to another dirve. Now we have a backup of the virutal machines as they were when installed. Then we wrote a batch file so when we run it, it copies the backup virtual machines overwritting the current ones. Now your back to start with the virtual machines.

It's pretty easy to do and doesn't take that long to copy the virtual machines, esspecially if you have 2 drives like us.

I have to say I liked what they mention in the article about Virtual PC having that rollback feature. I wish VMWARE had that, but for now this method works.

Re:Use in Tech Suppport?

[RhettLivingston]

I see that others have already noted that VMWare and Virtual Server 2005 allow this. Virtual PC 2004 also allows this. "Rolling back" changes is one of the neater capabilities.

Re:Use in Tech Suppport?

[seigniory]

Virtual PC does this, too.

VirtualPC is Slow

[waldoj]

I just got Virtual PC 6.2 for my Mac OS X box (1GHz G4 PowerMac, MDD, 512MB RAM) last week, and I'm disappointed. The business justification is that I need to be able to test development websites for clients in Windows, but my personal reason is that I want to run all of my old Sierra games. :) I can run Firefox and IE in Windows XP -- they're sluggish, with slow screen redraws and irritatingly long pauses for page refreshes, but it works.

My shock is in how badly that Sierra games run in DOS 6.22. I'm about a quarter of the way through KQ4 (I just got the damned golden bridle and delivered the unicorn, only to be sent off to get the golden goose from the ogre), and it's tough to even walk around. Rosella tiptoes along at one step every few seconds and then hauls ass across half the screen before slowing down again. I'm going to downgrade to DOS 5 and see if that makes any difference. Still, the fact that Virtual PC cannot properly emulate a decade-old DOS box is pretty pathetic.

I'm going to get another 256 or 512MB of RAM and see if that makes a difference.

-Waldo Jaquith

Re:VirtualPC is Slow

[Anonymous Coward]

What about DOSBox for Mac?

Re:VirtualPC is Slow

[NaugaHunter]

The fault might be XP. I'm running it on my 1.25Ghz Powerbook. I've tried some old games under Windows 95 and they run too fast - no Sierra games, but Ultima VI, Sam & Max, Scorched Earth, Battle Chess 2... I never tried them under XP. Once XP was running I copied over an old 95 I've had since Vpc 1 and installed a fresh 2000 Server for work which generally runs fast enough, even with a SQL server active. (Heck, even with the 2000 Server running games run too quickly in 95.)

I suggest if you're trying to run old games go ahead and make a 95 or 98 install, if you can find someone with an installation CD you can use. Even if you're booting into 'MS'-mode, I think an actual DOS or 95/98 install would help, though frankly I have no idea how to set up a DOS install these days.

Of course, more memory will definitely help, but trying an older Windows might help more. Of course, it may be how King's Quest 4 interacts with the Video-card - games with FMV don't work very well, nor do modern, bloated games of any kind.

Re:VirtualPC is Slow

[kingLatency]

While I share your experience that Virtual PC is slow on Macs, even newer/faster ones, I don't think the performance we've experienced is comparable to PC users using Virtual PC. After all, Macs running Virtual PC are emulating PC hardware, not just creating virtual machines.

Re:VirtualPC is Slow

[mattkime]

that ram is going to make a huge difference. 512 meg is basically the minimum for mac os x. you'll definitely want more if you're emulating another system inside that.

also, i've experienced better speeds with windows 2k.

Re:VirtualPC is Slow

[torpor]

i use vpc on an aging rev-a tibook, and find it usable. i'm not just being counter, i do find it completely usable.

i have gotten into the habit of just 'switching to a windows desktop' though ... perhaps you're not running in full-screen mode? i know its an obvious question, but when you use vpc's video driver in full-screen, things do get a lot smoother. i have noticed a lot of -skool osx/tibook hackers use windowed mode sorta sub-consciously, so i just thought i'd check...

at least, its been my experience that VPC does at least as well as running windows apps, at 400mhz on a PPC, as my last Windows laptop, which was a 333mhz IBM pentium-2. then again, i don't play games; mostly compilers/IDE usage, and i don't find editing screen refreshes too slow at all for coding use.

(vim user... and actually, i don't ever seem to be playing games with computers either these days, so .. grain of salt, yo ..)

Re:Oh you motherfucker!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your mummy likes this.

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtual PC emulated very standard, stable, and available hardware. A Soundblaster 16, a DEC tulip-compatible NIC, and S3 Trio 32 with 8M video card. Drivers are available for all of these from Windows 3.1 to 2003 and Linux. The "additions" for Windows (from 3.1 to 2kx) include "mouse-sharing", file sharing, and timesync (not for 3.1 unfortunately). There is a timesync daemon for Linux, but it only works with the Connectix versions of VPC (unless someone has updated it). Linux has drivers that work with all the emulated hardware, but there is no "mouse-sharing" or file sharing. That is the only downside, really. VPC's guest os driver set is NULL because Windows and Linux come with all the drivers required; you just don't get some nice additions under Linux (file sharing being the main thing).

Connectix VS Microsoft version

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually prefer Virtual PC 5.2 to Microsoft's edition, 2004. Got 'em both from MSDN subscription services.

fp?

Virtual PC is good software

[bahamutirc]

I've installed Win 3.1, 95, 98, NT4 and 2000, Linux (Slackware 9.1, then 10), Solaris 10, FreeBSD and Plan9 -- and I've never had a problem with any of them. I don't know why he couldn't get Fedora to work. Guess maybe it helps to know what you're doing.

This guy installed every operating system out there on his Mac OS X using Virtual PC. His website includes screen shots of each OS, plus what he had to do to get it working. I would like to see a public archive of OS images people can download and try (minus proprietary stuff). That would be pretty cool.

Re:Virtual PC is good software

[faragon]

Fedora Core 2, and Linux 2.6 in general, doesn't work at all in Virtual PC 2004; the reason: the Linux 2.6 kernel uses "code morphing" techniques (i.e. code that performs write operations to code regions, and may be that crashes the "virtualization" (may be due to some TLB misscontrol/missinterpretation, etc)).

Ah! Fedora Core 2 is installed properly in VPC2004 and VMWare... because the instalation phase runs in a 2.4 kernel (!).

VM Ware runs Linux 2.6, but not as well as it runs 2.4; the Linux 2.6 "code morphing" affects seriously also to the VMW guys. Linux 2.6 it is a good host for emulation, but not a good one to "virtualize"; I hope It will be fixed soon.

P.S. don't bore too much Mr Fabrice Bellard, let him work. Don't you remember LZexe? He programmed it when he was almost a teenager (!) Expect great things for Wine + QEmu, it is not vaporware.

Usability

[PacketScan]

I have used Vmware for over a year now and i remeber using the older version of windows virtual pc on my mac.
I know it's like comparing apples to oranges but i'd say Vmware is by far superior is usability, stability, and features. And the Fact that they do support every OS i run, makes it that much better.

VirtualPC has been bought by MS

[mousse-man]

...and would you like, if you were MS, to have it run your competitor's OS, or even, your (possibly) worst nemesys, Linux?

Not likely, if you ask me. And I doubt there will be a successor version of VirtualPC for MacOS X.

Re:VirtualPC has been bought by MS

[ConceptJunkie]

Then I think people would be more likely to go with VMWare, or (gasp!) get rid of Windows entirely.

MS shouldn't have to support other OS's, but to me, it would be in their best interests to maximize compatibility. But then I'm not evil so my opinions might be skewed.

Re:VirtualPC has been bought by MS

[EddWo]

Guess you havn't heard of Virtual PC for mac 7 it should be out in a couple of months.

Why would Microsoft want to miss the oppotunity to sell licenses for Windows and Windows Specific programs, Project, Visio etc on Macs?

Re:VirtualPC has been bought by MS

[mousse-man]

AFAIK, support for Virtual PC for Mac will cease sooner or later, so this is a moot point. But this goes into the same direction as Office versions for Mac.

Or are there any plans for long-term support of VirtualPC for Mac?

Re:VirtualPC has been bought by MS

[Nynaeve]

Unless MS needs it for a non-x86 X-BOX 2. VPC can give it X-Box compatibility.

Surprised?

[dj245]

I'm also a little surprised that Microsoft is not as compatible as it could be, given the competition.

Microsoft....not compatable.... as it should be?

And you're surprised you say?

Personal experience w.r.t games

[Utopia]

I have used both Virtual PC & VMWare.
Installing Operating Systems is faster on Virtual PC than in Vmware.

Surprisingly Windows XP Professional was the slowest install I had in VPC.
I have successfully installed FreeBSD, Mandrake 10.0 (KDE), Red Hat, Fedora on Virtual PC & VMWare with full networking support.

All my old LucasArts games (the primary use of emulation for me) work with Virtual PC.
I had terrible luck with VmWare w.r.t. running games.

Re:Personal experience w.r.t games

[Anonymous Coward]

Scummvm could be much easier solution for playing those old LucasArts games. But as you have virtual machine installed it doesn't matter anymore so much.

But anyone else that wants to try virtual machines for solely playing LucasArts games should try Scummvm first.

http://scummvm.sourceforge.net/

hardware is so damn cheap

[ch-chuck]

you can pick up perfectly usable pc's in the P3 600-1Ghz range for under $100, all the hand me downs from the clock speed race - why go to all the trouble of software trickery when you can just plug in 3 boxes, use once console and get to the others with vncviewer and terminal server.

Having said that, I would love to (have the time to) experiment with vmware ;)

Rdesktop

[Anonymous Coward]

So what can i do with either of these prodcuts that I already cant do with rdesktop?

Wait a second....

[Zetta Matrix]

Isn't this an apples and oranges comparison? (Not that anyone cares, necessarily...)

IIRC, VirtualPC is essentially an emulator. VMWare is actually a virtualization layer that only emulates the hardware interfaces, but the non-privileged application code can run directly on the CPU like it would "natively".

This by itself should explain the speed differences, as well as why VMWare requires x86 hardware to run Windows, while VirtualPC can run on a Mac (which would be impossible given VMWare's design).

I'm surprised that no one is mentioning this.

Re:Wait a second....

[typhoonius]

IIRC, VirtualPC is essentially an emulator.

The review's introduction says that the Mac version is an emulator but the PC version is simply a VM like VMWare.

Microsoft's VirtualPC site calls the PC version "a powerful software virtualization solution" (not that these sorts of blurbs are noted for their technical accuracy, but take it for what it's worth).

Re:Wait a second....

[tobybuk]

Unlike yourself!

Both these products use virtualization on x86 - look at the benchmarks!

I use VMWARE heavly and have nothing but good to say about it. Does exactly what it says it will.

I've yet to find any software it won't run.

Re:Wait a second....

[bsodz]

Zetta Matrix is correct. VirtualPC may do some virtualization but it mainly emulates instructions. One way to tell and a point not mentioned by the reviewer is that VMWare uses almost no extra cpu time, while VirtualPC takes about 50% of the cpu usage constantly (as per Task Manager).

Misinformation fixed

[grotgrot]

Both products can boot off raw hard disks. I even setup a new Gentoo system that way. VPC does however have a 137GB limit on raw disks which VMWare doesn't. Both products run quite slowly when installing an OS - they have to run in a maximum compatibility mode because of all the probing and other stuff OS installs do. Once the guest OS is installed they run faster.

Both products allow you to modify the virtual hardware (adding/removing ports, drives, images etc) after installation. Both products have undoable disks and various forms of networking (host only, share real NIC etc).

The last Connectix version of VPC had VNC access to your guests which was really neat. Microsoft removed that for VPC 2004 on "security" grounds. Technically that is true (VNC is an unecrypted protocol) but I suspect they would have removed it for marketing reasons anyway.

VPC does have a restriction that access to the host from the guest has to be done from kernel mode in the guest. That means for example that the Additions (VPC speak) / Tools (VMWare speak) have to be loaded into the OS in the guest. This prevents random user space programs in the guest from getting host access. I don't know if VMWare does something similar or not. It is however something to consider if untrusted software will be running in your guest.

The 2.6 kernel used in some distros doesn't work on VPC 2004 due to some self modifying code allegedly used in conjunction with the X server. Of course the VPC folks claim it is a Linux problem and the Linux folks say it is a VPC problem. Just remember that Linux is not a supported guest for VPC even though it usually works and MS haven't done anything (yet) to prevent it.

I have never had a response ever to a support issue raised with VMWare. I have had way more compatibility issues with VMWare. For example I have a bootcd that works on every real machine (I have tried over 10) and in VPC but fails in VMWare. With VPC I haven't had to raise support issues since it just works. There is a Microsoft newsgroup for VPC that works well.

Fundamentally both products work well. VPC is simpler and cheaper and does what it does well. VMWare is larger and more complicated and has lots more knobs for fine tuning and is also available for a Linux host.

We can thank MS for buying VPC as it resulted in VMWare dropping their price by almost 40%.

Re:Misinformation fixed

[IWTB]

Have you tried using the cdrom in legacy emulation?

Re:Misinformation fixed

[Anonymous Coward]

VMWare support used to be much better when they were a smaller company. Nowadays they won't answer, unless you have a support contract. If you do, however, then their support *is* excellent.

I've had very little compatibility problems with vmware.

Re:Misinformation fixed

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't VMWare have suggested that?

The baby's already been knifed, it's too late to cry "look out for the murderer."

Re:Misinformation fixed

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I've seen this pattern before. They'll just follow in the footsteps of other companies.

A Bottom-tier paid support will soon be added, shortly afterwards it will turn basically into free support (except now you're paying them to ignore you). Upper-tier support, available for your left arm and right leg, will be excellent, but at that point, you may as well go with the competition.

The first sign of something being wrong is when a company's support goes down the drain. The second sign is when they start extorting money out of you to get the support you should've gotten in the first place. The third sign is when they jack up prices and shaft everyone who doesn't ante up.

They've obviously progressed to step 2. Step 3 will follow. It always does...

Though not entirely on-topic...

[iantri]

... this article does bring up an interesting point on the first page.

If you want to run Windows XP in a virtual machine, appearantly you are expected to buy two copies of it because of the product activation.

Does this seem a little unreasonable to anyone else?

Re:Though not entirely on-topic...

[(H)elix1]

appearantly you are expected to buy two copies of it because of the product activation.

Yes, but... with VMWare, your hardware is virtual. Perhaps the person doing the first install had to do the product activation, but as long as you don't hork about with the ram allocated to the VM it can be passed from person to person without *ever* dealing with that crap again. Never having to re-activate is not the same as being licensed to use it, however...

Re:Though not entirely on-topic...

[roror]

I installed win XP pro on my machine first. I dual boot with Gentoo. Then I booted into gentoo and installed win xp pro again in vmware. It asked me to activate the product. I called up tech support for activation and explained them that I am not going to use my previous installation and I need one activation code. They gave me one without any more question. I have been true to them by not using my first installation after that. I just use the virtual xp any time I want to do something in xp.

Re:Though not entirely on-topic...

[fishbowl]

>Yes, but... with VMWare, your hardware is virtual.

The same machine running Windows XP and/or Office requires at least two separate activations:

One to run it "natively", and another one to run it under the VM. Reactivation is required if you make any changes to the VMWare config, not just RAM.

Re:Though not entirely on-topic...

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, imagine if you have 1 user, 1 processor. Why do they care if the "Windows 2000" kernel code is in multiple parts of ram at one time? What, I cannot put 2 kernels in memory at once? I didn't read that in the license...

Its not like I'll be able to "Open more windows" that way...

Re:Though not entirely on-topic...

[(H)elix1]

Reactivation is required if you make any changes to the VMWare config, not just RAM.

I've changed RAM sizes and updated VMWare drivers - never had it kick of an activation event. Not disagreeing with you about two activation minimum (one host, one guest), just not had any activation issues swapping VM images and tuning sizes to fit whatever workstation I hack my part into a demo/etc. I've fiddled with settings quite a bit too - going from workstation to laptop and back again - so in practice it has been a non-issue.

ESX

[jmoen]

I find VMWare quite superior to VPC any day. We now run 25 virtual servers (win2k3/2k and linux) on two IBM X445 boxes with the latest VMWare ESX version connected to a IBM Fastt SAN and it works just greate. I've tried VPC several times but it just don't "scale" the way VMWare do today, also since the management OS is linux with a very rich perl API available it's easy to work with if you're into that. I don't find VMWare ESX Server to be that expensive at all, with SMP support (on the virtual client) it's like $5000 or something.

The only thing that has been a problem so far is getting the VMWare client utils installed if the virtual OS is running the 2.6.x kernel.

We have both at our dev shop...

[Anonymous Coward]

And I like VPC because it is more lightweight, faster to configure, etc. I don't use the extra features in VMWare, I just need the ability to roll-back the OS.

However, I am of the opinion that Microsoft bought VPC just to kill the project. They DO NOT want this technology out in wide distribution, easy for anyone to set up in 5 minutes because it calls into question their licensing model (e.g. I have 1 processor, 1 user, 10 copies of windows 2000 running, why should I pay 10x licensing?).

Re:We have both at our dev shop...

[gonk]

Uh. If they're trying to kill the technology so bad, why are they working so hard to get Virtual Server 2005 out? I've been betaing it for a while, it rocks. I hope the pricing is better than GSX server...

robert

Yeah but ...

[Numair]

Does Doom 3 support it?

Okay, what about the trailer video?

IBM and EMC Ship VMWare

[Anonymous Coward]

I happened to see a copy of the solution prepared by IBM for an in-house Microsft SQL Server cluster. It involved a couple of their mini-computers along with VMWare and Windows 2000.

EMC bought VMWare in January and is planning on bundling it with some of their products.

Sadly, the ArsTechnica article makes no mention of the possibility of doing the Windows software activation process on a VMWare node. I have some friends who do this and it's made their life much easier.

I've run bochs before...

[BeneathTheVeil]

on a 333mhz celeron system, with only 64MB of ram. I installed win95, and it was very much on the slow side, but usable.

So, on a fast system, I'm certain it would more than adequately handle win98.

But the real question...

[clockmaker]

Can you install VMWare in a VirtualPC virtual machine, or can you install VirtualPC in a VMWare virtual window? Oh the confusion!

Actually, just last week I installed VirtualPC on two PCs in my test lab. This will allow me to easily test our product on different OSes (including Solaris x86, hopefully). And when I am done testing, I can just kill the session and re-copy the virutal hard disk for the next test. No re-install time.

I picked VirtualPC because it was cheap and it was in the list of software I could download from our Corporate on-line purchase system. I just start the ftp, and my department automatically gets billed.

...and several other hardware components

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right about Virtual PC support for ISOs. Virtual PC also supports adding extra hard disks, NICs, serial ports, and parallel ports. The article incorrectly states that Virtual PC does not support any of these.

VMware all the way for me!

[Anonymous Coward]

I used VirtualPC in MacOS X 10.2.8 on a PowerBook G4 (1 Ghz; 15"; 512 MB of RAM), and it is a slower than VMware v3.2.0 (P3 1 Ghz; 512 MB of RAM; Windows 2000 host) and v4.x (Windows XP Home host; P4 3 Ghz; 512 MB of RAM). I used Windows 2000 SP4 as guest OS' with about 128 MB of RAM. VMware beats in loading, GUI drawings, and everything else.

VirtualPC seems to dislike Windows Updates in my Windows 2000 SP4. Sometimes blue screens after updating and required reboots and updates failing to install.

Re:VMware all the way for me!

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps because you're not comparing Apples to well, PCs?

VirtualPC on the Mac has always been an emulator. It takes x86 calls, translates them to PPC, does other mojo. A crapload of overhead for emulation. That VPC runs as well as it does under OSX is pretty impressive.

VMWare, or VirtualPC for that matter, on PCs is a "virtual machine". It uses features of an x86 CPU to basically run a 2nd, 3rd, etc. virtualized version of your existing system hardware. Kinda.

Virtual machines are always faster than emulators. Bochs is a x86 emulator for PCs and it is horrifically slow in comparison to VMWare or VPC.

So in other words, your comparison isn't very informative nor hold any bearing on a VMWare vs. VPC. VMWare is not available on OS X, since it only runs as a virtual machine, which can only be done on a PC.

Easy as pie

[Anonymous Coward]

Read about it, download it. I love P2P!

VMware all the way for me!

[antdude]

I use VirtualPC in MacOS X 10.2.8 on a PowerBook G4 (1 Ghz; 15"; 512 MB of RAM), and it is a slower than VMware v3.2.0 (P3 1 Ghz; 512 MB of RAM; Windows 2000 host) and v4.x (Windows XP Home host; P4 3 Ghz; 512 MB of RAM). I used Windows 2000 SP4 as guest OS' with about 128 MB of RAM. VMware beats in loading, GUI drawings, and everything else.

VirtualPC seems to dislike Windows Updates in my Windows 2000 SP4. Sometimes blue screens after updating and required reboots and updates failing to install.

Also, VMware can do a lot more OS' than VirtualPC! :)

Heat and electricity?

[Proc6]

How about 6 burning hot P3's in a 3rd floor apartment when its 98 degrees out, vs 1 machine with 4 gigs of RAM running all of them, nice and cool.

DOS?

[drxenos]

I love VMWare for running really old DOS stuff. I even works with QEMM. If I could find sound drivers that work with it, it would be "perfect."

Re:DOS?

[demon]

Go download Creative's DOS drivers for the SB PCI128. VMware 4.5 provides a virtual ES1371 chip, which is the chip that the SB PCI128 card is built around. That should get you going.

Re:DOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks, Demon. I was told that before, but couldn't get it to work. Did you? Any hints? I'd be so freakin' happy to get this to work.

Xen blows everyone to dust

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd highly recommend reading this paper, comparing Xen with VMWare. The benchmarks indicate how much better things could be in the VM world.

Mac users

[Billly Gates]

People run VirtualPC to run windows on their macs.

People run Vmware to run alternative operating systems on their pc's.

There is a difference in markets. I think virtualpc can be used only on a pc but I do not know of anyone who uses it on that platform. I am sure their are exceptions but this is just what I observed.

Re:Mac users

[demon]

Did you read the article? This is specifically covering VirtualPC for Windows, not VirtualPC for MacOS.

Host OS

[bigbadwlf]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but since VirtualPC is Microsoft, I imagine that it only support Windows as the host OS.
If that's the case, the comparison is over as far as I'm concerned.
I have use for something that can run Windows under Linux, but not the other way around.

You want Microsoft Virtual Server

[bmajik]

I cant say much about it since it's unreleased, but i beleive its public knowledge. Virtual Server has a feature called "differencing disks", where you have a base virtual server image and then any changes to that image are written to a separate file - a difference disk.

This would let you do what you suggest.

Personally, i love virtual server, and i do all of my development and test work inside of virtual server images. Our product has an atrocious number of pre-relased platform requirements and rebuilding a bunch of physical machines is a big pain. I have a base Windows 2003 Server image with sysprep, and anytime i need a clean machine i just copy that .vhd over the .vhd of the machine im wiping, and fire it back up. I have one active virtual server image for each different code branch i need to work with (different branches will have different platform requirements that make putting multiple branches on the same box impossible)

In the END they Picked Virtual PC...

[haplo21112]

..which is a crock of shit...if your going to Virtualize spend the extra $60 bucks and get VMWare workstation.

Its better supported (they update several times a year)

It Supports NON-MS OS'es offically.

Its more robust.

Has a Linux Version which actually cuts the requirements by 25%-50% over the windows version.

No OSS

[sad_]

i would have loved to see at least one OSS VM project compared as well. too bad they didn't do it (even just for completness).

what happened to "enthusiast" pricing?

[no_such_user]

I bought a copy of VMWare at LinuxWorld NYC ('00? '01?) back when it was 1.0, and got it at a special enthusiast pricing ($80?). While they were good enough to give 1.0 license holders a free upgrade to 2.0, after that, they abandoned this pricing scheme. It's a shame... $80 was fine. $200 isn't. Not for a home user who isn't making a living off of the product.

VMWare, bring back enthusiast pricing!

Re:what happened to "enthusiast" pricing?

[base3]

Same here. I bought both Unix and Windows licenses at 1.0, and upgraded to 2.0 for a reasonable price. I never upgraded beyond that once they yanked the non-commercial pricing.

Not quite

[rnd()]

Strange that this article should come out now. The other day I tried both products in order to figure out which one would work better to 1) host a windows OS instance to work as a print server for the winprinter that I bought real cheap, and 2) to host mythbackend.

To keep things simple I settled on KnopMyth as a quick way to install MythTV. I had the opposite experience of the reviewer: Microsoft Virtual PC installed KnopMyth seamlessly, while VMWare 4.5 crashed when the image tried to boot (KnopMyth is based on a hybrid Debian distro, and I used the straight Linux optimization on VMWare).

It turns out that neither VMWare or Virtual PC were able to access my Hauppauge card, so I had to figure out another option, but I figured I'd add my $.02 to the issue.

Also, VirtualPC actually seemed a bit more zippy to me during the post phase, although I never got KnopMyth installed on it so I didn't really run any benchmarks.

VPC & G5

[Unregistered]

Will VPC ever support the G5?

this is kinda stupid

[minus_273]

Virtual Pc is a CSIM, vmware is an attempt at virtualizing intel (ia32 has a non virtualizable instruction set). two different things. Of course Vmware will be faster. Does vmware run on OSX? no not unless you use virtual pc to run it in.

Re:this is kinda stupid

[demon]

The article was talking about VirtualPC for Windows, not VirtualPC for Mac. Please read it before you comment - it's been well known for awhile that the new release of VPC was going to include a native virtualization release for Windows/x86.

VMWare on Mac via Linux

[wandazulu]

I use the Linux version of VMWare, and because of remote X, I simply run Windows under Linux displayed on my Mac. It can't run full screen, but it does allow for seamless mouse movement off of Windows to OSX. VMWare even popped up a couple of helpful messages when it detected that it was running remotely.

For this reason alone makes VMWare worth it over VirtualPC. Remote X + VMWare + Linux rocks!

Any available?

[charnov]

The only one I know of is Plex86 and they abandoned any hope of virtualizing anything except linux due to complexity (well, Win4Lin, too, but they are about dead). It can virtualize linux hosts, but not much else (I think they have DOS and maybe some unix-like OS's). Fact is, this is really difficult stuff to make. I was holding out on VMWares IPO as I thought that it was going to be one fo the hottest companies going in the next 3-5 years, but they sold themselves to EMC right before the IPO. Vitualization is going to be one of the big things in computing in the next couple of years, especially in the server space.

Re:Any available?

[cranos]

Try qemu. I have it running on Fedora, hosting a FreeBSD guest, and am looking at Windows compatibility. Sadly Solaris 9 shits itself, but who knows in the future....

bochs?

[rmohr02]

Has anybody tried bochs? How does it compare to VMWare and VirtualPC?

QEMU is fast

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, QEMU is exceptionally fast; much faster than you might expect. It is certainly within spitting distance of VMWare on my P4 2.2 laptop. One advantage that QEMU has over vmware is that the video card it emulates (a Cirrus) supports DirectDraw 1.0; which means that some games that won't start at all on VMWare will start and are actually perfectly playable on QEMU. I play Baldur's Gate 2, Age of Empires 2, etc on QEMU, and you won't get these going on VMWare...

Re:That wasn't the issue

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue is that Virtual PC only supports one virtual CD drive, which can either be an ISO or a real CD-ROM drive. If you want to use an ISO, you have to shut down the VM, change the configuration to use the ISO instead of your real CD-ROM drive, get the data off the ISO (or whatever), shut down the VM again, and switch the configuration back to use your real drive. So you can't have your normal CD-ROM drive usable while still having an ISO or two available.

MS Activation is the trick

[fishbowl]

I find as a VMWare user, that I am stuck with using the last versions of Windows and MS Apps before "Activation" started. Every VMWare configuration is a different machine, and so, once you activate under one config, you are shut out of later ones.

Just as buying the linux version of Mathematica was a mistake (you may not upgrade your kernel!), expecting to install MS stuff on VMWare is also a mistake, unless you are lucky enough to have activation-disabled versions of say, Windows and Office.

Perhaps there are mods out there to disable activation, but I have not come across any since before XP SP1, and none for Office XP or 2003.

Re:MS Activation is the trick

[JohnQPublic]

You need to hard-code your virtual Ethernet MAC addresses and all will be well. VMware's support pages have instructions on how to do this.

VM why?

[Fallen Andy]

Hey, you don't have another PC to play with? Geeze guys, if you QA your software under all those layers of gunk why do you think it might have bugs? Even if Connectix gets their emul bug compatibile with windows, is it really worth the bother? (I'd say the same for VMware 'cos at the end of the day you want to get close to the metal not far away. OK I'm an old timer.

I'm sure YMMV, but...

[therealtroff]

I must say that I'm very disappointed by my admittedly limited experience of VMWare. On my work laptop with 512MB RAM, a 1.6GHz P4 and a 7200rpm disk (yes, I upgraded) a single hosted XP machine (inside my XP machine) is enough to make the computer essentially useless. Installing a program that normally takes less than 30 seconds into the virtual machine takes not only 1 or 2 minutes but rather in the 5-10 minute range during which the disk light is continously lit and text appears seconds after being typed. Of course a laptop is a laptop so I decided to try it on my dual CPU machine at home only to find that it refused to even start on that machine. I've subsequently tried a plethora of builds between 4.0 and 4.5. Some of them pop up a dialog saying that there was an internal error while some appear to understand the futility of that dialog and simply crash. I even tried a couple of GSX Server builds with just as abysmal results.

Re:I'm sure YMMV, but...

[demon]

Funny, I run multiple virtual machines (Win2K, FreeBSD 4.x, NetBSD, FreeBSD 5.x, etc.) simultaneously on my Athlon 1.33 GHz dualhead box at work (it has 2 GB of RAM), and I can run it quite comfortably. If you were running it on top of XP - which is kind of a piggy anyway - with XP _inside_ the VM - why the heck are you asking "uh, why's it so slow?". C'mon, this is a total gimme.

I've also used it for serial console netboot testing when I didn't have any real machines to experiment with (yay VMware PXE booting + bridging mode!), which I thought was pretty awesome. Very nice for getting a custom FreeBSD kernel generated for doing serial console right (grumble grumble).

Re:I'm sure YMMV, but...

[therealtroff]

I'm not asking "why's it so slow?". I'm asking "why is it an order of magnitude slower?". Hell, I'd even be happy if it wasn't even half as fast, but much more than that and it starts becoming useless. I wasn't aware that VMWare was an interpreter.

As I said, I can't get to test it on my dual Athlon machine because none of the versions I've been able to get my hands on work.

It is already integrated in MSDN universal

[fprog]

Well, partially it is.

It's in the MSDN Universal all-you-can eat buffet DVD license.

My boss which has 2 MSCE; therefore, we had 10 free licenses of Virtual PC,
but since running VM Ware was like much faster
and we could hook up USB devices, serial/parallel ports, CDROM ISO files, floppy, any hardware,
any partition, into the VMware layer, we bought VMware licenses.

Thanks to few hand twistings and VMWare excellent product.

Not sure about comparisons....

[igiveup]

I started out using VMWare, and tried Virtual PC when Microsoft bought Connectix (we received a copy with our MSDN subscription). I would say Virtual PC is an easier tool to use, and has several nice features such as drag and drop to and from your host, etc.

The things going for VMWare are cross-platform availability for die-hard Linux users, and it is more configurable, though in my opinion it is more difficult.

Virtual PC is far cheaper as well.

Re:Not sure about comparisons....

[Anonymous Coward]

VMware has drag and drop between windows hosts and windows guests, just like VPC. As of Workstation 4.0.0.

No soup for you

[dbIII]

Win4Lin is no longer for sale. I base this on the fact that I wrote to them two months ago to ask about an educational discount so that I could buy a copy for my kids to use to play Reader Rabbit.

They just sent the email entitled "no soup for you" to the wrong address.

Lots of companies would ignore similar requests, or at best send a polite refusal.

Re:No soup for you

[Just Some Guy]

See also http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=116570&cid=986 4724 that I wrote about seven hours before your post (but accidentally sent as an AC - still getting used to this trackball).

Re:No soup for you

[dbIII]

Their sales and support staff certainly no longer exists

I would say simply at the low level that a lot of places are sinking to - a lot of sales enquiries are ignored by many places, and in a lot of cases any enquiry asking for more than their standard one size fits all deal comes back with the response "no soup for you!" - or in other words, if you don't like our deal we won't sell you anything - go away. Bad sales practice, but it happens a lot.

Not to worry...

[Cow007]

M$ will finish cannibalizing the code soon...

This gets Strange I repeat This get Strange

[Anonymous Coward]

QEMU Depending on setup is a emulator or virtualizer

qemu-fast uses the host Memory Management Unit (MMU)

This is more virtualizer due to the fact a special kernel is required due to system changes.

Speed of linux this way is a lot faster than normal. Due to the special kernel still slower than linux runing in linux.

They are hoping to get it better so it does not need the mod.

Note normal qemu would be a emulator full basicly what one are you taking about.

that, my friend

[RMH101]

...is a bloody brilliant idea. thanks!

Memory support in VMware

[TimMann]

The 1 GB limit in VMware Workstation has been removed as of version 4.5. See http://www.vmware.com/support/ws45/doc/whatsnew_ws .html

Re:Memory support in VMware

[agallagh42]

Cool, that's good news. No reason to use VPC then, as long as the company is paying for it :)