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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."
I'm fairly sure it's not entirely VMWare's fault ;)
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
Two points about your post:
1) this is the commercial version of VMware.
2) the beta versions of VMware WS 6 had debug code active that slowed down the guest VM. try the final release of VMware WS 6, and you'll find there are no longer any performance issues that are VMware's fault.
What I like about virtualization is that you can add a layer of security with it. Virus? Trojan? Spyware? No problem. Just don't save settings or blow away the infected virtual image. More people should surf the web from a virtual machine.....it isn't like you need the full blown performance of the host O/S to surf the web.
You can mount directories from the host O/S to save certain pieces of information (bookmarks for example) so that they persist across VMs. Everything else, you aren't really worried about.
Layne
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All you need to do to emulate the Vista experience is a sharp stick and your own eye.
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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.
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Depends on the version - you need to buy the most expensive one in order to be allowed to virtualise. Big surprise, huh?
that's almost right, but to really nail dah feelin' you'd pay someone else for the eye poke with the sharp stick
...now Vista can virtually suck, too.
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.
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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.
IE does not run on .NET.
This isn't much different than any other modern OS. They all have strict separation of user/kernel code and libaries at a given point. OS X and Windows both have clearly defined subsystems (Win32/Posix/.NET3?, Cocoa/BSD/etc.)
and let's see what you'd have if you ran VMware in Linux
- JavaScript running on some browser
- some browser running on Qt/Gtk and libc
- Qt/Gtk running on an X server
- X server and some browser running on libc
- libc running on some unixlike kernel
- some unixlike kernel running on VMware
- VMware running on libc, the kernel, and Gtk
- Gtk running on an X server
- X server running on libc
- libc running on some unixlike kernel
- some unixlike kernel running on real hardware
The workstation version of vmware is great for all kinds of things. I use it when setting up my portable apps on my USB drive (I don't use windows, regularly, but want to have some tools with me when on somebody else's computer, so I set up VMWare with winxp).
Take a snapshot, do an install. Tweak to make portable. Revert the snapshot to pre-install. See if the app works from the USB drive (which is actually mounted under linux, and shared to the vmware session).
Thing is, it doesn't prevent phishing, stealing sensitive info or any of this. Even if you try and keep everything important out of the virtual machine, you still have to type out your e-banking login in there, to login to your e-banking.
Bottom line, it makes reverting after a disaster easier. Which is easy enough on the real machine if you are doing full & regular incremental backups with a program like Acronis True Image.
Virtual machine has its uses, but it's not a layer of security, just the good old "divide and conquer" principle, as if you had a dedicated web browsing machine.
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.
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