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

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.

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.