Submitted by “Was it really only a little over three years ago that the formerly fanciful notion of being able to run Windows apps within OS X without major limitations became reality? Today, archrivals Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion continue to undergo aggressive upgrades aimed at making the virtualization of Windows on Macs even more powerful, seamless, and simple. And today, VMware is announcing that it’s taking preorders for VMware Fusion 3, which will ship on October 27th.”
Is VMWare-* still such a resource-hog, bloated pig?
I haven’t got any chance to test it yet, but if it is, then I’m avoiding it in favor of VirtualBox/Xen.
I don’t own a mac but I setup my little sister’s Macbook with Bootcamp + VMware Fusion. I originally had her using VirtualBox but now she needs Bootcamp. I don’t know why but the VBox setup seemed faster and more stable than this new setup when in MacOS X. I didn’t have time to do comparisons with parallels.
Having the ability to boot directly into XP for resource intensive programs is a huge plus especially since she needs to run all these engineering/CAD programs that are Windows only. Being able to run that same XP install inside MacOS X for small/quick things made VMware the winner.
I’ve seen the hacks to get VBox working with bootcamp but since this is not my machine and I don’t want to provide 24/365 support for it I choose not to do it.
Now Vmware, how about a version for Ubuntu – Linux !
Id like to go for Linux as a foundation OS ..
For ordinary apps Virtualbox etc are probably enough … But its the 3d / games Id like better support for.
Now Ive seen that Virtualbox has started getting 3d support .. But far from perfect yet I guess ..
Both VMware workstation and server works on Ubuntu LTS (and can be made to work on 9.04 with a little bit of extra work)
However, Regular Linux suck as a VM host (no matter what the hypervisor), only the specialized hypervisor distros like ProxMox (OpenVZ), XenServer (Xen) and VMware ESX/ESXI works well.
Now that’s a bit of a news to me. I have both VMWare and VBox installed on a [Arch] linux host and I never had any problems or whatsoever.
Yes, but how about the Windows 3d games support ?
Thats the stuff Id like supported better in the virtual machines ..
Uhm … I don’t think that VMs were made for gaming purposes, so you probobly completely missed the whole point. Buy some console.
Except that VMWare markets it as being able to play some 3D games due to limited DirectX and OpenGL support. It doesn’t work very well at all though, and they should probably drop that out of their marketing plan.
I could get Worms Armageddon running in a WinXP-VM on VirtualBox (in windows), not yet tried on Linux though.. Hope it will work Worms is really almost all I want to play, and maybe SimCity4 .. Old games.. Not cutting-edge FPS crap ..
In what regards do they suck? I find VMWare Workstation very useful for testing on Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit; I regularly run about 5-7 VM’s at a time on a 4 core, 8GB RAM machine.
On my MacBook Pro with 4GB, I run about 3 to 4. Also very useful.
Disk access primarily, The rest is fine.
VMware Workstation on windows has about 3 to 4 times better disk access speeds than (an optimized) Linux. The VMware developers claim that it is because Linux does not allow detailed control over dirty page write back.
The best workaround on Linux is to run only one VM at the time, use a physically separate disk for the VMs and if possible a hardware raid controller with battery backed cache (like a perc 5i for example).
Another possibility for speed up is raw partitions, but these require special configuration and makes the VM difficult to move around.
Finally you got iSCSI disks, and it also improves performance somewhat.
However the workarounds above also improves performance for the windows system so standard Linux still lags.
Nevermind…
Edited 2009-10-08 15:08 UTC