VMWare Rolls Out Vista Virtualization

MsManhattan writes "VMWare Inc. today is slated to introduce a new version of its workstation virtualization software that supports Windows Vista. The upgrade, VMWare Workstation 6, enables users to run Vista as a host or a guest operating system. Additionally, it allows users to store a virtual machine setup on a portable device — like as a USB drive — and transfer the set-up to another computer. Virtualization, an old concept that has gained new momentum, can help organizations optimize their infrastructures but it can also create expensive management headaches. Just the same, the analyst group Gartner predicts that three million virtual machines will be in use by 2009, up from today's 500,000."

Comments

Just three million?

[Werrismys]

I bet that figure is far too low.
Everyone uses virtualization now.
Half the servers are virtualized.

Where I work some laptops are fitted with virtualized DOS/Win98 environments for very old software (to control old EPROM burners etc). Much easier to roll out a working VM environment and just copy it around than fiddling with constantly changing hardware.

Maybe I'm missing something here...

[Mikachu]

...but didn't Vista's TOS specifically ban using Vista under a virtual machine?

Re:Maybe I'm missing something here...

[julesh]

No. In fact, some versions of Vista explicitly allow you to run them under both a virtual and non-virtual machine at the same time (i.e., they're not restricted to only one copy in memory at once). This unrestriction wasn't applied to all versions, which led some people reading the EULA to believe that MS were preventing you running those versions of vista under a virtual machine, but if you read the T&C the right way (which is how a court would read it -- standard terms like this are supposed to be read in the way most favourable to the consumer) you're allowed to, as long as you don't also use the same copy on a real machine.

Back to good(?)-old-days of dumb terminals?

[anoopjohn]

First it was dumb terminals and super-duper-server and then it was good pcs and now we are going back to super duper virtual machines and just dumb terminals

Multiple monitor display: Users can configure one virtual machine to span multiple monitors or multiple virtual machines to each display on separate monitors with this industry-first capability, enhancing desktop productivity. Only thing left is for it to support multiple keyboards and mice to take us back to that.

I *heart* VMware

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

This is welcome news. Let me tell you, virtualization has saved my ass many times, and growing (especially when it's windows).

Example: A system fails to come back up after update and gives me my favorite hal.dll error. Since the hardware abstraction layer is different for nearly every machine, simply grabbing the hal.dll from another machine is not possible.

Now there are several strategies to tackle this problem, for this instance however, because this was a virtual machine living with several other guest OSes which are all running on identical virtual hardware I simply ran a compare between the system32 drives of the borked windows and a working one - found several HUNDRED missing files (how did that happen, who knows), mounted the borked vmdk as the g: drive and copied the good files over to it.

unmounted and rebooted to fully operational status.

Didn't it work before?

[BestNicksRTaken]

I thought all that was preventing you from running Vista under VMWare was Microsoft's licensing, i.e. you had to buy the uber-expensive ultra-mega-pro-corp-enterprise-unlimited version, and not the crappy home version dell gives you.

I know Vista Home can run VMWare Server as a host (tried it) and Parallels on the Mac can run the MSDN version as a guest (seen it).

So what's the news? Is it really just that Workstation 6 has come out of beta?

The problem is Vista's excessive layering.

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the problems we encounter with Vista is that of excessive layering. This truly harms system performance.

Take your typical AJAX web app. Assuming an IE on Vista client, running on VMware on Windows XP, this is the stack that you've got (from top to bottom):
- JavaScript running on IE
- IE running on .NET
- .NET running on the Windows Vista Win32 or Win64 API subsystem
- Win32/64 API subsystem running on the NT HAL subsystem
- the NT HAL subsystem running on the VMware hardware
- VMware running on the Windows XP Win32 API subsystem
- the Windows XP Win32 API subsystem running on the NT HAL subsystem
- the NT HAL subsystem running on the actual hardware

That's a pretty big stack, with each layer dropping the performance somewhat. A lot of the trouble is due to the JavaScript and .NET layers. At least VMware stays relatively close to the hardware. But in order to offer the high-level services of JavaScript and .NET, a lot of performance must be sacrificed.

This is my pathetic analogy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Homer: What do I do? What do I do? In the name of God you've got to tell me! [sobbing]
Agent 2: Relax, it's just a simulator. Nothing can go wrong.

Re:Network in a box

[legoburner]

I am just posting to try and get the general /. attitude towards Xen... Xen seems to be the fastest virtualisation option by quite a margin, and has excellent features (pci device forwarding anyone?), but will never be in the official linux kernel by the developer's own admission.

Xen has a number of unfriendly (minor) glitches. It is locked in to specific kernel versions unless you really want to have a lack of stability. On the Xen mailing list developers have stated it is not suitable for enterprise use yet.

I was wondering if people are feeling positive about the future of Xen in general? There is still an active developer community (perhaps equivalent in size to mythtv a year or two ago), but will Xen be beaten back by the rapid advance of other technologies, or are the benefits from Xen enough to keep it rolling forwards regardless of alternative virtualisation products?

FWIW, I have 9 Xen virtual systems running on one core 2 duo server (3GB ram) now, and will be pushing that up to about 12 systems as a 'network-in-a-box' solution to a lot of my coding and home network requirements too and I am generally a big fan. I prefer vmware by a long margin for ease of use, but in terms of raw power Xen seems to have vmware beaten by quite a margin (and the PCI passthrough is very very useful for a print server and for playing with network cards). I think Xen will obviously continue to grow but I cant help but wonder if it will fall too far behind a few years from now.

Parallels

[Necrotica]

After using Parallels for Mac, VMware has a lot of catching up to do. Coherence mode, the ability to run virtualized applications seamlessly on the Mac desktop, is a beautiful feature.

If the Linux version of VMware offers something similar, I'd be very interested.

Re:Parallels

[shadester]

If you can't see the difference between OSX UI and a windows UI, then it might be a problem. Myself, I like the feature. For example to use Outlook Web Access on IE instead of safari or camino makes a big difference. Then I can have a windows IE among the other regular windows I usually have open. Really sweet.

cpu frequency problems

[yamla]

VMWare Workstation 5 had a problem when the host operating system changed the CPU frequency. This made the guest operating system clock go wacky and the guest itself almost unusable because letters I'd type would be repeated when the operating system thought I had held down a key for a second or two. The official workaround was to disable frequency scaling on the host operating system which is really not acceptable.

Can anyone tell me if they fixed this issue in 6?

Gartner is very wrong

[janap]

"the analyst group Gartner predicts that three million virtual machines will be in use by 2009, up from today's 500,000"

Our small company alone will have rolled out more than 5000 virtual machines by that time, which would account for 1/500 of the volume increase. Not very likely. We replace the hardware of old legacy client systems running OS/2, put the OS/2 system inside a Xen VM, and add another VM running Linux which is our migration target. Very sweet.

There will be a lot more virtual machines by that time. A lot. In all likelihood as many as a hundred times more.

Re:Network in a box

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm my opinion KVM will flush Xen away... But it will take some time.

The free and open Xen is super-slow for anything I/O related when running hardware-virtualized systems (eg Windows or unmodified Linux). Super-slow as in network and disk I/O is basically unusable for anything but single-user desktop use. It's actually so slow that VMWare's VMplayer under Linux that is *not* using hardware-virt is faster than Xen's hardware-virtualization, on the same hardware (pathetic, but true... I've tested it with a ten users Windows 2003 Server tested both under Xen 3.0.4 then under VMplayer).

The bad news: the drivers that makes hardware-virtualized guest I/O not-suck are closed-source and $$$.

The good news? For para-virtualization Xen rocks. Bad news: only modified OSes run as para-virt guests. I've got my SVN / Samba / Squid / NFS servers running as Xen para-virtualized guests. Rock stable and super fast.

PCI device forwarding is nice but AFAIK it only works for para-virtualized guests: in other words, you're not forwarding that super-fast GFX card to your Windows guest, which is stuck with a lame emulated (by QEMU) videocard.

Here's a summary from a few months ago as to why KVM beats Xen easily, and I completely agree with the article. KVM is a little bit new but I expect to switch to KVM very soon. It simply has to many advantages over Xen.

http://udrepper.livejournal.com/15795.html

Simply put: Xen is driven by XenSource and they're out to try to make a buck. They're not playing nice with the community. Their developers base is shrinking and shrinking, with already quite some transfugees that went to KVM. Also there are some big-Linux-kernel-developers-names behind KVM. The XenSource guys are fighting a battle lost in advance for the "hardware-virtualization" side for sure. For para-virt I don't know. There are so many drawbacks with Xen and hardware-virt CPUs will just keep getting better and better at doing hardware-virt (hence minimizing the difference between para-virt and hardware-virt).

KVM made it into the Linux kernel. It's not easy to beat that. Technically Xen isn't "linux only" (it runs on Solaris too, for example) but, still, I don't see Xen as a viable alternative for long. (and this is coming from a huge Xen fan: as I told you, I've got several servers running as Xen VMs).