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Virtual Machines


Do you use Virtual Machines? If so, which one?  

24 members have voted

  1. 1. Do you use Virtual Machines? If so, which one?

    • VMware
      11
    • Win4Lin
      2
    • Qemu
      4
    • Other
      2
    • All The Above
      0
    • Don't Use
      5


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if you are interested I can post results on my "xen" experience.

 

Tomorrow I try xen domain0, and I've got VMware ESX server.

 

I guess its a little beyond normal emulation but it kind of fits in with this topic :)

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I just tried Parallels Workstation (latest beta) which looks and feels like a VMWare twin.

Actually not twin- much easier installation, less options, and very fast installation and VM performance- IMO much faster than VMware. Price is just a fragment of the one for VMWare Workstation.

But still it has some issues, e.g. getting focus for some USB devices is next to impossible.

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if you are interested I can post results on my "xen" experience.

 

Tomorrow I try xen domain0, and I've got VMware ESX server.

 

I guess its a little beyond normal emulation but it kind of fits in with this topic :)

I'd like to know how you get on with Xen. I've read a great deal about it but was too scared to try it (plus it sounded like I would not be able to emulate Windows with it). It is meant to be significantly faster.

 

Leo

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  • 3 months later...
Guest milesw
I'd like to know how you get on with Xen. I've read a great deal about it but was too scared to try it (plus it sounded like I would not be able to emulate Windows with it). It is meant to be significantly faster.

I think XEN is a little overated with all the publicity etc. Setting up seems a faf. Currently I am investigating OpenVZ and for ease of use it is ahead of XEN. Although they both require custom made distributions, which is more work. VMWare ESX is a bit hardware and architecture specific and definetly not worth the cost

 

As for parrallels I think it iis way ahead of VMWare workstation. Qemu is good, but the network emulation is not great.

 

I am in the middle of assesing VM and emulation and thought I would add my thoughts to this thread

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Only found out not long ago, that VMware Server (used to be GSX server), is now freely available.

 

This allows you to run multiple operating systems on one machine, but can access them remotely and have them displayed on your machine across the network with all the processing done on the host system, and not your desktop/laptop, etc.

 

Although, I did something similar a while back using VMware player, and then redirecting the output from my desktop Linux system to my laptop Linux system :P

 

Not as neat as using a client app managing it all, but I used a ssh connection to the desktop to initiate the vmware player and direct screen output to my laptop instead of the desktop.

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I use MAME to play old arcade games now and then. I've also messed around with parallels, although there is nothing I need Windows for, was just curious.

 

EDIT: Although Parallels can be used to run just about any OS, not just Windows, I know. :P

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Basically, you install Debian, or whichever operating system you want to run on. You then install vmware-server. This runs a service if you like, that allows a specific tcp port to be open for vmware clients to connect so that you can access the images from, say, your desktop even though the images are stored on the system running Debian, etc.

 

Whilst running the client from your screen, it's actually just displaying the screen on your machine, all the processing is done on the machine with vmware-server installed.

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I'm now using vmware-server on debian, with a bunch of guest machines (gentoo, debian, win2000, and win2k3)

How does VMware Server work w/ Debian when you run multiples guest OSes at once?

so far performance seems pretty good.

 

I have heaps (6 gig) of ram, and therefore needed a kernel upgrade (standard deb kerel only supports upto 2 gig ??? )

 

disk IO is a biggie .. I'm running raid (mirror) drives, and can thrash the IO a little bit when doing heaps of junk .

I did winblows updates, and gentoo updates all at the same time, and noticed a few "disk waits" when trying to write to the disk from 3 guest OSes, all doing big downloads.

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Just using vmware workstation at present, and find it perfectly fine :P

 

Although my colleagues have just built a vmware-server, that I'm yet to use when I return to the office in a couple of weeks.

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