No more need to buy/pirate vmware?

[Barnaby W. Füi]

As reported on /. .. xen is supposedly faster than vmware (only a few percent overhead), GPLed, runs on linux and windows, and soon freebsd.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Doh.

Seems that xen doesn't actually install under a host OS; it runs directly on the machine, and you run other OSes under it.

 

[GhettoFob]

How is that better than just running the OS directly?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: GhettoFob
How is that better than just running the OS directly?

You can run a bunch at once.

 

[mikecel79]

This is very interesting. I've always wanted to try VMware but the cost was too much for me. Has anyone actually used it yet?

 

[Nothinman]

How is that better than just running the OS directly?

VMware is great because it allows me to run Win2K and WinXP at the same time on top of Linux, effectively giving me access to 3 OSes at the same time.

Xen seems like a decent idea, but the fact that OSes need ported to it sucks. If it ever got to the point where a lot of different Xen ports were available it would definately beat dualbooting though.