Slashdot Mirror
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."
University of Warwick file sharing faggots.
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 2, June 1991
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
Preamble
The licenses for most software are designed to take away your
freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public
License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free
software--to make sure the software is free for all its users. This
General Public License applies to most of the Free Software
Foundation's software and to any other program whose authors commit to
using it. (Some other Free Software Foundation software is covered by
the GNU Library General Public License instead.) You can apply it to
your programs, too.
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not
price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you
have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for
this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it
if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it
in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.
To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid
anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights.
These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you
distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.
For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether
gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that
you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the
source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their
rights.
We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and
(2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy,
distribute and/or modify the software.
Also, for each author's protection and ours, we want to make certain
that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free
software. If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we
want its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so
that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the original
authors' reputations.
Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software
patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free
program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the
program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any
patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.
The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and
modification follow.
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION
0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains
a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed
under the terms of this General Public License. The "Program", below,
refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program"
means either the Program or any d
I'm fairly certain Vista has been supported as guest OS on VMWare ESX 3 for some time.
I hope VMWare's fixed its Vista performance problems in this new version: running Vista as a virtual OS even under the commercial versions of VMWare was slower than dirt in the last cut.
(1) Install Vista from someone else's DVD
(2) Make a VM image from this
(3) Forget about ever having to activate it
(4) Profit from a free Vista installation
I come here for the love
what does an analysis company base it's numbers of virtual machines on ?
It's not like they are being sold or something like that...
you know you want to...
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.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
...but didn't Vista's TOS specifically ban using Vista under a virtual machine?
Looks like 64 bit support is getting better, although Feisty Fawn isn't supported as a host OS yet. From the release notes:
New Support for 32-Bit and 64-Bit Operating Systems
This release provides experimental support for the following operating systems:
* 32-bit and 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5 (Beta, formerly called 4.0 Update 5) as host and guest operating systems
* 32-bit and 64-bit SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP4 (Beta) as host and guest operating systems
* 32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu Linux 7.04 as a guest operating system
This release provides full support for the following operating systems:
* 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Vista as host and guest operating systems
* 32-bit and 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 as host and guest operating systems
* 32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu Linux 6.10 as host and guest operating systems
* 32-bit and 64-bit Mandriva Linux 2007 as host and guest operating systems
* 32-bit and 64-bit Solaris 10 Update 3 as guest operating system
* 32-bit Novell Netware 6.5 SP5 as guest operating system
and committees give 0ther people
For those of you that haven't used VMware, there is a pretty decent howto on installing it on Windows XP:
How-to install VMware Server on Windows XP SP2
--jdan
"Be the change you wish to see in the world" - M. K. Gandhi
All you need to do to emulate the Vista experience is a sharp stick and your own eye.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
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.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
Reduce, reuse, cycle
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?
#include <sig.h>
Yeah, I'm working on a network in a box at the moment, Xen based though. Should be able to scale it from a single user on a single physical machine to thousands of users on tens of machines with almost zero downtime. Very nifty technology.
Deleted
To clarify: I'm using a system whose hardware is several times larger than Vista's recommended specs (and without Aero) and Vista still runs many times (10x?) slower under the commercial VMWare (v5) that it does when I wipe the box and just install Vista. Other Windows OSs on the same box are quite snappy under commercial VMWare (v5).
I'm hoping VMWare version 6 fixes this.
One of the problems we encounter with Vista is that of excessive layering. This truly harms system performance.
.NET .NET running on the Windows Vista Win32 or Win64 API subsystem
.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.
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
-
- 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
I could *possibly be persuaded to allow Vista onto one of my machines if someone gave me $200.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
that's almost right, but to really nail dah feelin' you'd pay someone else for the eye poke with the sharp stick
Not very well...
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=234079&thr
Certainly looks like it. And as for the managerial problems - well, I RTFA, and I couldn't make out any specific problems (apart from possible licensing issues, which is always a good one because you can say that about almost any technology you like). Read like a typical Gartner puff piece designed to spend a couple of hundred words not saying anything in particular, but generate a few soundbites for a mindless PHB.
...now Vista can virtually suck, too.
If you started this action, continue.
* Emulating the Vista Experience
To continue, jam a pointy stick in your eye, and then click OK.
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.
I am one of the unintelligent few who installed a copy of vista business on my laptop at the beginning of the year. I have been using vmware workstation to run linux under windows for about a year now and as such was very interested in VmWare's progress on supporting vista as a host operating system. VmWare 5.5 would run under vista, but only after a lot of tweaking and even then the performance was less than stellar. I enrolled in the 6.0 beta testing program as soon as it was available and I have not been impressed with the product so far. What I have found is that VmWare has fixed most of the nagging issues with User Access Controls etc., but there are still a few major things lacking. The first is that the networking to host OS's seems to disconnect after each suspend without any messages about why or even how to reconnect them. The second seems to be the interaction between vista and VmWare. For whatever reason any time I do a power operation on the guest OS (suspend, restart etc.) my hard disk starts thrashing like crazy and I am unable to use the machine for 2-3 minutes. This is on a laptop with 2Gb of ram that never had these issues under WindowsXP. Additionally, these hard disk thrashing issues happen at random times while I am using the guest OS. Perhaps some of this is due to the debugging that is enabled with the beta builds of VmWare, but I'll certainly be a bit cautious about spending my several hundred dollars on upgrading to Workstation 6.0 given the performance that I have seen so far.
Have they implemented 3D harware acceleration virtualization? I don't see a lot of point in virtualizing Vista if you can't have the 3D desktop stuff.
Wow! I could swear I was really using virtual vista!
I Like virtual machines but I wish they would allow true 3d acceleration. I have an xp machine(for gaming) with a virtual ubuntu installed. However I cannot install beryl because of the limitations of the system. If there is a way and I missed it, let me know.
Isn't most of the point of running Vista (as opposed to XP) that you'd have DirectX 10, Media Center, and Aero? Given the hardware requirements of Vista, I seriously doubt you'd be getting any good gaming or media experiences in a Virtual Machine.
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.
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?
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
I'll get my grandma right on it!
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
You are poking yourself in the eye with a sharp stick. Cancel or Allow?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Oops - I didn't realize Vista wasn't supported yet and I've been running it for a few weeks in VMWare Fusion for OSX. It runs great (MBP C2D) and is much faster than the -XP line. I've only got 512MB allocated to it too.
VMWare Fusion would be just about perfect if they added support for adding block devices from files like on linux. Hopefully in the next beta.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Snapshot manager?
USB 2.0?
Alas, I have not tried the very latest Parallels since I don't have a Mac (I use other ppls macs at the office) but from the little experience I have:
Parallels about equals the free 'VMware Server 1.02' product. It is in no way comparable to either the ESX lineage or (an exaggeration) VMware Workstation.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
For a low low price of $420, a Linux user can run Windows Vista on their Linux distribution.
If I could an OS, I would build custom Linux OS that exclusively runs VMware. Kinda like Windows 98 and Dos. The computer would boot with Linux OS like older pcs booted DOS first, then go straight to Vmware so the entire computer is virtualized. And the Linux OS is designed to only allow vmware to access the internet.
\
Having Vista run inside of Linux could cause problems for Microsoft Windows. Accept or Deny
"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.
would it take to slow MS Office down to OpenOffice levels?
Wouldn't it be broken easily if Vista is virtualized? Or are virtualized hardware untrusted, thus not able to play anything that requires PMP?
"The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
you mean, now vista can suck virtually everywhere.
Just installed this AM, haven't tried every 'bell and whistle' what I have tried works fine, two thumbs up. Good job.
Guy Cook Internet Marketing and Consulting Solutions since 1995.