VMWare how dost I love thee

[reverend boltron]

So I don't know if I'm the last person on the planet to have ever heard of VMWare, but seriously, it's awesome.

So now I'm installing Ubuntu on my laptop via VMWare, and I don't have to worry about creating LiveCDs and whatnot, and I can have all the stuff set up on my virtual machine, and install programs as I like, and all that. It's so sweet. I have two monitors, one with Linux and one with Windows. Yes, there is a performance hit, but it isn't huge. It isn't that much to even really notice.

I highly, highly, HIGHLY recommend trying out VMWare Server, it's free. It allows you to put on another OS without having to dual boot. It's very fast, and you can still have the safety of Windows in case you end up getting skurrd about Linux. So it really is dope.

I don't know everything there is to know about this, but as far as I'm concerned, for what this program is, it offers such a valuable service and convenience that I am literally amazed that it's free.

The beauty of it is you won't have to worry about messing up partitions when you install the OS on your system. That is awesome. Awesome.

Here is a link to a YouTube guide for installing Ubuntu on Windows XP. Linky
If you are interested in doing this, download VMWare Server and you'll be good to go. Install it, even though it might come up with an error about IIS and such suchary. Linky2

FYI:I contemplated putting this in the software forum since it's technically about a piece of software, but then I realized it's also about trying out different distros and OSes and then I thought, maybe I should put it ni hardware, since it is virtual hardware, but that was going too far.

 

[Nothinman]

VMWare is indeed awesome, I even purchased licenses back in the 4.x and 5.x days and that's saying a lot coming from me. These days I have been just using VMWare Server but once the 3D acceleration in Workstation gets up to par I might have to buy a license again. The primary downside is that there's no 3D acceleration (or at least it's pretty primitive so far) so you won't be able to play with things like Compiz in Linux.

I don't know everything there is to know about this, but as far as I'm concerned, for what this program is, it offers such a valuable service and convenience that I am literally amazed that it's free.

Then you'll probably be more amazed to find out that non-free VM solutions are the minority. There are free as in beer releases from both VMWare and MS but in the OSS arena there's also Xen, qemu, kvm, lguest, vserver, VirtualBox and probably others that I'm forgetting about.

 

[Brazen]

Yeah I purchased licenses for Workstation back before VMWare Server was free, too. It just saved SOO much time in testing and development. When trying out new software I could take a snapshot, mess around with things, then restore the snapshot if I didn't like the affect it had or wanted to see what would happen if I did it a different way.

We now have the VMWare ESX Server at work and have moved most of our servers into virtual machines. I even use the free VMWare Server on a little celeron box I use as a server. I installed the bare minimum of CentOS4 and put VMWare Server on it. At the time all I wanted was a file server (Ubuntu Dapper Server), so I only had one virtual machine running on my physical machine. Sure it would have been easier just installing my file server directly on the physical machine, but what if my old old hardware dies? I don't have to reinstall and reconfigure my file server. Granted I have to reinstall VMWare Server, but that is trivially easy and really has zero configuration beyond accepting the defaults.

Plus, I've actually added a MySQL server and 2 web server that I use for testing on that same physical machine at home. So I can play with and break these virtual machines without affecting my file server which I prefer not to be without (has all my music, pictures of the family, and all that stuff) while repairing my breakage.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: reverend boltron
...
If you are interested in doing this, download VMWare Server and you'll be good to go. Install it, even though it might come up with an error about IIS and such suchary.

Your IIS error can probably be taken care of by going to Add/Remove Programs and installing the personal web server in Windows XP. VMWare will set up a remotely accessable web page on your machine that you can bring up and check on the status of virtual machines and change settings, if you would want to do that through a web page instead of through the VMWare Console application.

 

[yinan]

ESX Server 3 is the shizznit.

 

[slag]

Originally posted by: reverend boltron
So I don't know if I'm the last person on the planet to have ever heard of VMWare, but seriously, it's awesome.

So now I'm installing Ubuntu on my laptop via VMWare, and I don't have to worry about creating LiveCDs and whatnot, and I can have all the stuff set up on my virtual machine, and install programs as I like, and all that. It's so sweet. I have two monitors, one with Linux and one with Windows. Yes, there is a performance hit, but it isn't huge. It isn't that much to even really notice.

I highly, highly, HIGHLY recommend trying out VMWare Server, it's free. It allows you to put on another OS without having to dual boot. It's very fast, and you can still have the safety of Windows in case you end up getting skurrd about Linux. So it really is dope.

I don't know everything there is to know about this, but as far as I'm concerned, for what this program is, it offers such a valuable service and convenience that I am literally amazed that it's free.

The beauty of it is you won't have to worry about messing up partitions when you install the OS on your system. That is awesome. Awesome.

Here is a link to a YouTube guide for installing Ubuntu on Windows XP. Linky
If you are interested in doing this, download VMWare Server and you'll be good to go. Install it, even though it might come up with an error about IIS and such suchary. Linky2

FYI:I contemplated putting this in the software forum since it's technically about a piece of software, but then I realized it's also about trying out different distros and OSes and then I thought, maybe I should put it ni hardware, since it is virtual hardware, but that was going too far.

Its a neat concept and a lot of people use it at work, HOWEVER, 2 gb of ram is the bare minimum you should have to do this. try it with 4 gb or so and its acceptable. Winxp takes 2 gb of ram just to be more or less functional (i.e, you can actually compute with it without using the slow swapfile all of the time).

Basically you have an os, with another os running on top of it using the vmware framework.
No thanks, I'll just get another computer.

 

[zbalat]

No beryl/xgl with VMW...I'll keep dual booting.

 

[Nothinman]

Its a neat concept and a lot of people use it at work, HOWEVER, 2 gb of ram is the bare minimum you should have to do this. try it with 4 gb or so and its acceptable. Winxp takes 2 gb of ram just to be more or less functional (i.e, you can actually compute with it without using the slow swapfile all of the time).

That's a pretty extreme view point, I'm using an XP VM with 512M right now on a machine with 1G and it runs just fine. Ideally I'd like some more memory so that I could run a few more VMs at the same time but there's no way in hell you need 2G for XP to be functional.

 

[her209]

Snapshot is one sick feature.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: slag

Originally posted by: reverend boltron
So I don't know if I'm the last person on the planet to have ever heard of VMWare, but seriously, it's awesome.

So now I'm installing Ubuntu on my laptop via VMWare, and I don't have to worry about creating LiveCDs and whatnot, and I can have all the stuff set up on my virtual machine, and install programs as I like, and all that. It's so sweet. I have two monitors, one with Linux and one with Windows. Yes, there is a performance hit, but it isn't huge. It isn't that much to even really notice.

I highly, highly, HIGHLY recommend trying out VMWare Server, it's free. It allows you to put on another OS without having to dual boot. It's very fast, and you can still have the safety of Windows in case you end up getting skurrd about Linux. So it really is dope.

I don't know everything there is to know about this, but as far as I'm concerned, for what this program is, it offers such a valuable service and convenience that I am literally amazed that it's free.

The beauty of it is you won't have to worry about messing up partitions when you install the OS on your system. That is awesome. Awesome.

Here is a link to a YouTube guide for installing Ubuntu on Windows XP. Linky
If you are interested in doing this, download VMWare Server and you'll be good to go. Install it, even though it might come up with an error about IIS and such suchary. Linky2

FYI:I contemplated putting this in the software forum since it's technically about a piece of software, but then I realized it's also about trying out different distros and OSes and then I thought, maybe I should put it ni hardware, since it is virtual hardware, but that was going too far.

Its a neat concept and a lot of people use it at work, HOWEVER, 2 gb of ram is the bare minimum you should have to do this. try it with 4 gb or so and its acceptable. Winxp takes 2 gb of ram just to be more or less functional (i.e, you can actually compute with it without using the slow swapfile all of the time).

Basically you have an os, with another os running on top of it using the vmware framework.
No thanks, I'll just get another computer.

I have a box with 512 megs of RAM and a Celeron 500 running 3 virtual machines: 1 file server, 1 database server, and 1 web server. They all run fine with 64 megs of RAM each and I'm thinking of setting up a 4th virtual server just for Ruby on Rails applications with Mongrel.

Granted, these are gui-less linux virtual machines and host, but generally all you need is (how much RAM your host uses) + (how much RAM you want to give your virtual machine) + ( about 128 mb for overhead). So 512 would be a generous amount for the host if it is XP, plus say 256 for an ubuntu vm, plus 128 for VMWare overhead means you need 896 mb or RAM to comfortably run an Ubuntu vm on an XP workstation.

I used to use VMWare Workstation on my XP laptop which had 1 gig of RAM and I could easily run 2 Windows vms with almost no noticeable performance loss. I could start up a 3rd virtual machine, if I kept the RAM down to about 192 per vm, but then there would be SOME noticeable performance loss.

 

[ITJunkie]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
VMWare is indeed awesome, I even purchased licenses back in the 4.x and 5.x days and that's saying a lot coming from me. These days I have been just using VMWare Server but once the 3D acceleration in Workstation gets up to par I might have to buy a license again. The primary downside is that there's no 3D acceleration (or at least it's pretty primitive so far) so you won't be able to play with things like Compiz in Linux.

I don't know everything there is to know about this, but as far as I'm concerned, for what this program is, it offers such a valuable service and convenience that I am literally amazed that it's free.

Then you'll probably be more amazed to find out that non-free VM solutions are the minority. There are free as in beer releases from both VMWare and MS but in the OSS arena there's also Xen, qemu, kvm, lguest, vserver, VirtualBox and probably others that I'm forgetting about.

True, with XenExpress you also get a true hypervisor to get you even closer to "hardware" speeds. The only real bummer is you need a processor that supports VT(duo core 2?) and it will only do 2 vms I think.

 

[Nothinman]

True, with XenExpress you also get a true hypervisor to get you even closer to "hardware" speeds. The only real bummer is you need a processor that supports VT(duo core 2?) and it will only do 2 vms I think.

Xen runs just fine without hardware VT support, it just can't run unmodified OSes so you're stuck with Linux and any other OSes that were ported to Xen.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Sorry for bumping an older thread, but for each VM, it is best to have it's own processor? (IE 2 VMs for a dual core proc, 4 VMs for quad core,etc).

 

[Navid]

Is there a free VM that lets me run XP on Vista and let's the virtual XP access a USB port?

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: Fullmetal Chocobo
Sorry for bumping an older thread, but for each VM, it is best to have it's own processor? (IE 2 VMs for a dual core proc, 4 VMs for quad core,etc).

Nah, that is not at all necessary. I run 3 virtual machines on a single processor and they run just fine. In fact, if you limit yourself to one vm per processor, you will be making poor utilization of your system. Processors spend a LOT of idle time so the advantage of vms is to get more use out of each processor.

One thing though, if you have 2 physical cores, you will still want to limit yourself to assigning one processor to each vm. You would think giving your vm 2 processors would increase it's performance, but that is not the case because it has to wait until BOTH processors can be reserved. If you have an intel processor with hyperthreading, though, do enable it. Due to the way the vm has to reserve a processor, it can actually use both virtual processors per core. So if you have 2 cores with hyperthreading, then your system sees 4 virtual processors, and if you have a vm with 2 processors than it only has to reserve 2 of the 4 virtual processors.

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: Navid
Is there a free VM that lets me run XP on Vista and let's the virtual XP access a USB port?

In MS's VirtualPC I've had Win2kpro working with full access to all hardware. So I don't see why it wouldn't work.

 

[Nothinman]

Sorry for bumping an older thread, but for each VM, it is best to have it's own processor? (IE 2 VMs for a dual core proc, 4 VMs for quad core,etc).

If you're running really CPU intensive tasks on them you'd probably want that, but otherwise it would be a waste of resources.

In MS's VirtualPC I've had Win2kpro working with full access to all hardware. So I don't see why it wouldn't work.

Impossible, VPC presents a set of virtual hardware so while some is directly accessible like USB devices they have to be exclusively locked by the guest so the host can't use them and it's limited to USB and maybe firewire if VPC supports firewire. Also you can assign raw disks to VMs in VMWare instead of going through files for the virtual disks but I don't know if VPC supports that.

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Sorry for bumping an older thread, but for each VM, it is best to have it's own processor? (IE 2 VMs for a dual core proc, 4 VMs for quad core,etc).

If you're running really CPU intensive tasks on them you'd probably want that, but otherwise it would be a waste of resources.

In MS's VirtualPC I've had Win2kpro working with full access to all hardware. So I don't see why it wouldn't work.

Impossible, VPC presents a set of virtual hardware so while some is directly accessible like USB devices they have to be exclusively locked by the guest so the host can't use them and it's limited to USB and maybe firewire if VPC supports firewire. Also you can assign raw disks to VMs in VMWare instead of going through files for the virtual disks but I don't know if VPC supports that.

Ah, ok. Everything I tried to use in VPC seemed to work, so I assumed it had the same access as the host system.

 

[Nothinman]

Ah, ok. Everything I tried to use in VPC seemed to work, so I assumed it had the same access as the host system.

Just look in the device manager in the guest in VPC and you'll see all of the emulated hardware. Ever wondered why there's no 3D acceleration in guests? Actually that one's being worked on but it'll likely involve VPC using OpenGL or DX to drive the card while the guest uses a special driver for an emulated 3D card.

IIRC Xen has the ability to give direct control over a PCI device to a domU but when you do that no other domains can touch that device. It would be impossible to arbitrate direct access to hardware and all of the drivers would need to be rewritten since they currently require exclusive control. Just look at how unstable DOS was because userland could poke at hardware directly and take that to another level because you'd have 2 OSes who think they're the legitimate owner of a device and no one in between them to arbitrate access.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Does the host register CPU usage of the virtual PC? My machines are always kept at 100% CPU usage with distributed computing tasks, but the projects are set to give CPU power to a program that requests it (ie they use any available power). Could this cause conflicts when using a VM?

 

[Nothinman]

The host CPU has to be used by the VM because it's the only one you have, to the host the VM is just another process.

 

[Navid]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

In MS's VirtualPC I've had Win2kpro working with full access to all hardware. So I don't see why it wouldn't work.

Impossible, VPC presents a set of virtual hardware so while some is directly accessible like USB devices they have to be exclusively locked by the guest so the host can't use them and it's limited to USB and maybe firewire if VPC supports firewire. Also you can assign raw disks to VMs in VMWare instead of going through files for the virtual disks but I don't know if VPC supports that.

I am not sure if you are saying that the guest can or cannot use a USB port!

Can a guest OS access the USB port through the host OS?

I thought this capability existed! Just, not on free ones. Is that not right?

 

[postmortemIA]

Originally posted by: Fullmetal Chocobo
Does the host register CPU usage of the virtual PC? My machines are always kept at 100% CPU usage with distributed computing tasks, but the projects are set to give CPU power to a program that requests it (ie they use any available power). Could this cause conflicts when using a VM?

VM is a single process on host system.

 

[Nothinman]

Originally posted by: Navid

Originally posted by: Nothinman

In MS's VirtualPC I've had Win2kpro working with full access to all hardware. So I don't see why it wouldn't work.

Impossible, VPC presents a set of virtual hardware so while some is directly accessible like USB devices they have to be exclusively locked by the guest so the host can't use them and it's limited to USB and maybe firewire if VPC supports firewire. Also you can assign raw disks to VMs in VMWare instead of going through files for the virtual disks but I don't know if VPC supports that.

I am not sure if you are saying that the guest can or cannot use a USB port!

Can a guest OS access the USB port through the host OS?

I thought this capability existed! Just, not on free ones. Is that not right?

Yes, it can. I specifically said "while some is directly accessible like USB devices they have to be exclusively locked by the guest" so you can give the guest a USB device but you can't use it in the host or any other guest at the same time.

 

[Navid]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Originally posted by: Navid

I am not sure if you are saying that the guest can or cannot use a USB port!

Can a guest OS access the USB port through the host OS?

I thought this capability existed! Just, not on free ones. Is that not right?

Yes, it can. I specifically said "while some is directly accessible like USB devices they have to be exclusively locked by the guest" so you can give the guest a USB device but you can't use it in the host or any other guest at the same time.

Can this be done with a free VM software?