If you have a mixed network like I do sometimes you have to compromise. At my job we run Windows, Linux and a sole Mac (Graphics dept.) and lets face it, when you do consulting work and if you design and develop custom applications you have to be able to develop for your clients platform and as much as I hate it, it's a Windows world. Before I used to have 2 workstations, one Windows and one Linux, or I had to dual boot. In the past, virtual machines have been lacking. Either they were too slow or lacking a certain pizazz to get the job done. Enter VMWare Workstation 4.
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I wish I had VMWare. But I have no real use for it, and I can't afford it. That said, I've always found it interesting. Now onto a question. VMWare uses special drives for video right? I mean on the windows/linux/whatever guest you have to install a driver they made to run in anything other than VGA mode, right? So that means that it won't run BeOS or some other guests OSes except in a low quality video mode, correct?
Why wouldn't you spend less than half of that money on a new hard drive and dual boot isntead?
Yup, BeOS won't run on VMWare correctly anyway of other I/O issues, not just the video (which runs in very slow VESA, more info here: http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=87 ). There is an API to write a VMWare video driver though, so the OpenSTEP folks and the SkyOS guy have already wrote such a driver in order to get better acceleration.
>Why wouldn't you spend less than half of that money on a new hard drive and dual boot isntead?
This is what people don't understand. They think that VMWare is a consumer product for OS geeks. News flash, it is not.
VMWare Workstation is mostly geared for developers who want to do cross-developing, or trying different versions of the same OS, e.g. Microsoft could use VMWare to *test* all their internationalization. Having dual boots costs money in time and administration, something that VMWare pays off.
Why would you need or want 3d acceleration on a virtual machine? If native python can't push 3d, don't expect vmware to.
As a developer, a virtual machine is a great tool for testing. You can have a virgin installation of an operating system (or many OSes) to see how your program will run outside of your development environment which is probably heavily tweaked and loaded with an abundance of software. Anyone developing a simple 3D-related programs might want to take advantage of a virtual machine so they could do what other developers do with the VMs. The reason is definitely less compelling. No 3D game programmer worth their salt would fail to test their game on real-world platforms with real 3D accelerators (as drivers vary so much from manufacturer to manufacturer). But simple 3D apps that don't push the envelope of Direct3D or OpenGL would make great candidates to test on a VM given it was fast enough to accelerate 3D.
The comparison to Win4Lin is pointless. Why not compare it to PowerPoint?
VMWare emulates a hardware platform, complete with CPU, memory bus, disk hardware, etc. Win4Lin (and Wine, etc.) emulate the API's.
While I *could* use VMWare to run WinWord or PowerPoint on my Linux laptop, as the reviewer pointed out, this requires 256M+ of RAM plus untold CPU dedicated to a stupid word processor.
Win4Lin and Wine take a fundamentally different approach - one that does not suffer from the enormous overhead of simulating an entire HW platform.
If you're going to have someone review the product, why not get somebody who actually understands what it does, instead of this featherweight?
I realize that Linux is very, very far from becoming a gaming platform, but for every other possible use of my computer I find it far superior to other OS'es. Since I only own one computer which runs Apache and other daemons, I'm very hesitant to restart and dual-boot to play games in Windows. Wine is great when it works, but I've tried the new version of VMWare and have to say that running Windows' own libraries makes a huge, huge difference. If VMWare were able to handle DirectX at even half the speed of native Windows, then to me the whole concept of Wine/WineX seems a bit pointless unless you absolutely can't stand to have the Windows desktop on your monitor. Sure, it won't run Doom III, but to me that's setting your expectations way too high.
Is it really true that speed(VMWare_4)>speed(Win4lin)?
I don't know why you have a motif interface, mine uses GTK+1.x
The best thing about VMware for me is the ability to try out every single new OS that comes out with out the need to format my har drive every to seconds. Mostly when I start to think what Linux version I would like to run on my main computer, I can just go and try out 10 different Linux's, and a few other OS's to see what I like best.
>Is it really true that speed(VMWare_4)>speed(Win4lin)?
This is what Robert claims. For me, it is the opposite. Win4Lin is much-much faster than VMWare on my dual Celerons 533.
To me it looks more Motif then GTK, As for the speed I found VMWare faster, and you can run a variety of Other Operating systems where with Win4Lin you can only run Win 95, 98, ME.
Why wouldn't you spend less than half of that money on a new hard drive and dual boot isntead?
Two words: Server consolidation.
Comparing VMWare to Bochs is flawed.
Its like comparing apples and oranges because VMWare is a virtual machine, while Bochs is an emulator.
Bochs can run on any architecture you can compile it on, where as VMWare REQUIRES an x86/ATX setup.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=VMWare&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-...
In a google group search for VMWare, the results are mostly related to VMWare running under Linux on the first page.
People keep saying you can't compare to Bochs or Win4Lin.
Of course he can.
News flash for a lot of people they solve exactly the same problem - namely "I want to use Linux as my main OS, but I have these windows apps I need to keep using, how can I do it". VMWare, Bochs and Win4Lin (or wine) are 3 different ways of solving that problem.
Each has advantages and disadvantages, but for a lot of people they are just 3 ways to get the same outcome.
For me, VMWare is the better mechanism as I'm more interested in having 3 different windows images (Win9x, Win2k, WinXP) for testing apps on.
But for some people Win4Lin is faster, and therefore more useful.
But Bochs allows people to run (in theory) any x86 OS on any computer.
Pick which ever one suits your needs best, but don't claim they're unrelated.
They are all good, but I still prefer to use KVM.
Yes, a 4 port Keyboard, Video, Mouse and now USB switch connected with 4 computers (3 of them inexpensive, just my old ones) by only one keyboard, mouse and monitor.
Usually I turn on just 2 of them each time in my small network, and don't have to bother about small glitches that are always there on emulators, virtual machines and api translators, and also with no speed penalty.
the 4.x branch upgraded the gui on win32, a much nicer look and feel than the old 2.x + 3.x branch.
i use it all teh time when i do my os dev stuff, no reboots, just fire up vmware.
its also a lot nicer than bochs for osdev, since bochs lacks complete support for things like the PIC. fire a value at the PIC and bochs will die with an error about unsupporting features. (same code will work on a real machine as well as inside vmware).
Just to let everyone know, I installed VMware 4 before on RH9, and it resulted in a GTK+ 1.x interface and not the old motif interface. Strange to see it with motif and not gtk. Maybe some sort of beta version?
vmware 4 sucks on my redat 9 system. Ok, It's a PII350 with 256 MB RAM and I have XP as guest OS, but with a kernel.org standard kernel I do not have this problem:
Harddisk access from XP (on it's virtual disk) causes my system to hang for seconds. I cannot interact in any way.
This happens only with my redhat9 kernel not with the standard kernel. Any Idea ??
i'd be great if somebody could explain this to me.
how does VMWare work?
in order to run an os, you need to emulate ring0, but VMWare runs only as an app (ring3). but to let the guest-os multitask it must change ldt's, gdt's, provide memory protection, ...
how can that be done in ring3 ????
No way. I won't push my luck to the max.
>> Sure, it won't run Doom III, but to me that's setting your expectations way too high.
Not necessary, there will be a native Linux version of Doom III 
how does VMWare work?
in order to run an os, you need to emulate ring0, but VMWare runs only as an app (ring3). but to let the guest-os multitask it must change ldt's, gdt's, provide memory protection, ...
how can that be done in ring3 ????
---
you only need to emulate system instructions. eg: add eax,ebx can run fine, but mov eax,cr0 needs emulation.
so you only emulate things that hit system regs, (pushf/popf, cr?/dr? etc).
you only need emulate a handful of instructions. and fake the rest.
df is right. All you have to do is trap a few protected instructions and handle them.
Not sure how NT/XP does it, but I know on the old Win386 model, in fact, it was common for ring 3 code to *deliberately* cause a fault in order to get the VMM's attention. 
Ah, life on the edge.
I thought it was a good review. Short, to the point, covered the key features. Good job, Robert.
I _hope_ it's a LOT more than "30 % faster than its predecessor", which I found totally unusable on my system (Athlon 2000, 1 GB RAM, GEForce2 video): for that, I found
response time per keystroke or mouse-click on the order of 15-30 seconds. The culprit seems to have been its inability to work within my usual desktop -- 8 desks at 2048x1536. (I am unwilling to go back from the "desktop metaphor" to the "porthole metaphor" just so I can run a few MS apps -- Crossover Office does a much better job of that for me. VMWare 3.x was _useless_!
VMWare Workstation 4.0 costs US $299.
Here is what I've just found on Ebay :
IBM PC 300PL, Pentium II 450 MHz, 64 MB RAM, 6.4 GB hard drive : US $94
Compaq Deskpro EN, Pentium II 450 MHz, 10 GB hard drive, 256 MB RAM : US $90
Intergraph TD-260, Pentium II 400 MHz, 192 MB RAm, 6.4 GB hard drive : US $70
Sun Ultra 5, 360 MHz, 128 MB RAM, 8.4 GB, Solaris 9 : US $215
According to the above, with US $299, I can get either one of these choices :
three brand name Pentium II 400/450 MHz or
a Sun Ultra 5 and an Intergraph TD-260
The specs of the computers mentioned above show they have enough juice to run most OSes that VMWare 4.0 supports, plus many others (Solaris 9, NetBSD, OpenBSD, QNX, ...).
Now, why would I pay for VMWare instead of creating a network comprised of these machines and a big bad server that would have been the host OS ? I have read the documentation on VMWare and I still don't see why it's such a good investment.
That software supposedly allows a business to "build complex networks all on a single computer". Isn't this kind of configuration a security nightmare ?
Also, when it is written that VMWAre Workstation 4.0 "eliminates costly deployment and maintenance problems", I wonder what's so tough in maintaining a BSD or Linux distro that has been properly installed on a dedicated computer ?
Unless the host OS is linux, Netware or FreeBSD, I suppose a copy of Windows is already available. So, all one has to do is buy some used computers, make them part of the existing network and voila ! they're ready to test the software they've just created on another platform.
I'm just trying to understand the rationale behind VMWare, considering that quality computers are affordable these days and that of all the hosts OSes supported by that product, only Windows and Netware must be bought.
VMWare is a great product. I've used it for years for development. I can have one machine and have multiple virtual machines running. If I need to test my app on multiple platforms or configurations it's perfect. I can have one with NT 4.0, IIS 4, SQL 7, one with W2k, IIS 5, SQL 7, one with W2k IIS 5 SQL 2000, etc. I can test a complex installation procedure and if it fails, reboot the virtual machine discarding all changes made during the session and bring it back up in the previous state and test again. At the last place I worked, we had a quad xeon machine that ran W2k plus 3 virtual machines concurrently. Each virtual machine was a replica of a client's server. This way we could test upgrades and troubleshoot errors before deploying.
One thing from the article:
"In previous versions, networking was daunting to say the least."
I've used VMWare extensively since 2.0 including all versions on windows and linux, even when I was new to the program I never had a problem with networking. I never even thought of it as an issue it so easy.
Also, 4.0 uses GTK not motif in linux. I think the reviewer must have had some other issues (hardware or software?) contributing to his problems.
I just tried Bochs 2.0.2 last night and the performance is incredible considering that it emulates an entire x86 PC...well maybe not entire
it's adequate for running Win98 and DOS...i wouldn't use anything more recent with it because that would be sloooooooow
If you need to run an OS inside of another one, and you're broke (like I am) Bochs is the way to go!!!
good work guys!
Dork...
"While I *could* use VMWare to run WinWord or PowerPoint on my Linux laptop, as the reviewer pointed out, this requires 256M+ of RAM plus untold CPU dedicated to a stupid word processor."
The reviewer did not mention MS Word. Your argument leading up to calling him a featherweight is based on something you imagined in a bad trip last night...
Please learn how to read...
RedHat does something in their kernel that resets the nice level of root-owned processes that access hardware directly. This makes X niceness automatically set to -10 which improves the GUI response. It also messes up VMware.
To fix it while still running a RedHat kernel, run VMware with nice -1 vmware.
It's simple why you'd use VMware rather than an entire new machine:
1) Your way, I have to buy a new machine for every OS I want to use. Try having to buy all those machines (or even some of them) that you suggested, and you're easily at the price of a copy of VMware.
2) VMware is only expensive the first time. Upgrades to the next version are only $99. Ie, if you buy version 1, version 2 costs $99. So does version 3, and then 4. In my case, I was lucky that my company bought me version 1, and have only paid $99 to get the new versions.
3) Vmware saves TIME. If you have to reinstall an OS on a physical computer, it takes a while. If you create a default Virtual Machine in VMware, you can copy the files to a separate directory. Then, when you break your existing VM, just delete it, and copy the other files back. Voila! Instant Virtual machine in less than a minute.
There are other benefits, but those are probably the best.
Anyone who have tried and compared VirtualPC for Mac or Windows to VMWare?
I stopped reading the moment I realised that is was being written by someone with very little understanding of how it worked. You cannot compare VMWare to Bochs. 1 is a virtual machine, the other is a true emulator. Boch emulates the i386 and can be run on a mac or anything else that's not PC. VMWare can only be run on PC.. They are totally different, and this is why the perfoamcnce gaps exists...
vmware is also great for help desks, testing out boot discs without rebooting, testing out networks without 2 computers, surfing the web in a safe "cocoon" that you can just trash or set back to a certain state if things screw up and trying out freeware/shareware to see if you trust it to be on your main OS, without worrying about it screwing your main OS.
>>When compared to Bochs or Win4Lin it blows them away in speed.
That's pure BS. No way is VMWare anywhere near as fast as Win4Lin. Win4Lin is faster than just running Windows itself.
vmware on a P-II-350 with 256MB of RAM is insane. Get something beffier, say at least a 600MHz, and use 512 MB of RAM. Also, a newer HDD, with better ATA speed will help.
I tried vmware in a 400MHz, and it crawled. On the other hand, Win4Lin on a 400MHz worked at (almost) native speed.
Hope this helps.
The culprit seems to have been its inability to work within my usual desktop -- 8 desks at 2048x1536.
-------------------
SCREENSHOTS! ))
>> Why wouldn't you spend less than half of that money on a new hard drive and dual boot isntead?
Because I need Linux and Windoze to run concurrently. It is also a great tool for development, and I'm not just referring to writing code. Whenever I have to develop operational solution, VMWare has come to the rescue as a great testing platform.
Some of the things I have done with VMWare:
- Solaris 9 x86 Beta
- kickstart configuration testing
- FreeBSD evaluation
I've also used VMWare to take advantage of old systems and breath new life into them. For instance, our build farms for different flavors of OSs are actually running on old HP lt6000r servers which would otherwise be fairly useless. We've crammed 16 virtual machines in a single box, saving space, power, blah, blah.
Besides, you want to crank up the uptime on your Linux box, don't you? :-)
VMWare is great indeed. I've been using it for years, but was not sure if upgrading was worthwhile. More speed is better, I think that is compelling enough.
And for others here: VMWare virtualizes a PC (like Boch does). But it does it differently. Boch emulates instructions, VMWare only protected instructions. That's why VMWare is so much faster. The disadvantage is that VMWare works only on i386.
And not only can you run Windows and Linux side by side, but it's very easy to run FreeBSD on Linux as well, or Plan 9, or whatever.
The people who mention dual boot miss two points: with one single laptop I can travel the world and have 10 OSes available at a mouse click. You don't really think I can carry 10 laptops around, do you? Not to mention hardware support and driver issues.
The second point they miss is doing cross platform development. Ever tried to write software that runs on multiple OSes? Change a line of code, test it on a few OSes. So reboot, wait, wait wait. Oops, didn't work. Oops, code is on NTFS file system, and that is read-only in Linux. Reboot. Fix line. Reboot, wait, wait wait. Ah works. Reboot, select other OS. I hope you get the point now.
With VMWare you can easily have a few OSes running. They mount your src directory using CIFS or NFS, or plain ftp, and you can just simultanously test a lot of things. I type my code in one editor (Emacs), and compile it on different OSes. You really don't know what you miss if you haven't tried to do this with VMWare.
There is not much software worth my money, but VMWare definitively does.
Now, why would I pay for VMWare instead of creating a network comprised of these machines and a big bad server that would have been the host OS ? I have read the documentation on VMWare and I still don't see why it's such a good investment.
Wow - let's see:
1. You have a laptop and are a consultant. I need to be able to run Win 3.1, Win95, Win95 OSR2, Win98, Win 98SE, Win2000, WinXp Home, WinXP Professional, Linux (4-5 versions) due to customer requirements. According to you, I should just lug around 13 or so laptops?? Riduculous.
2. You want to run multiple servers and need to back them up every day - run them on one machine, and you only need one locally attached tape drive, only need one gigabit port, only need to deal with a single remote login for remote maintenance.
3. Server sonsolodation - only power for a single server - not 3,4,6,10 whatever. Let's not even talk about heat dissapation, cable management, port reduction (they are expensive when you are talking Cisco), backup, backup management.
Granted if you are just dorking around at home, buy some cheap 2nd-hand machines and a KVM and be done with it, but there are serious reasons for using VMWare - both the workstation version and the server version. Just because it may not be right for you, doesn't mean it isn't right for everyone.
i have used vmware in seval projects.
the great thing about it is, that with vmware you are able to create serval images of a opearting system or a specific setup.
and whenever i need to test something in win95/98/98se/me/nt4/w2k/xp or any other operating system, then i can just copy that image from the net down to my system and start that virtual machine and start testing.
dual-booting could be okay if you need permanent another os, but just for testing it would be a overkill. it would be a heck of work to maintain all this diffrend setups if you would need to dual-boot.
and another great thing is, that you can setup a virtual machine and then set it to non-persisten. then you test/install/whatever you need and then just power off the virtual machine and you are back to the initial state or if you want then you can apply the changes and then continue from there. with dual-boot this would be another problem...
the price for vmware may be high, but compared with the time i save by using all the diffrend images and sharing them with outher consultants/developers in my office, the initial price pays back very quickly (and i am not talking about months you have to use vmware to pay back. as a consultant, the payback is gainied eaven if i would only save serval hours. and with vmware compared to dual-booting and all the problems with dual-booting and setting up that dual-boot environment... vmware is a big big thing).
cheers
SteveB
Yes, I use it to test cross connections between XP and W98 (SQL Server application). And it works very fast: on AMD XP 1.6+ with 512MB RAM with Windows XP installed on a Host plus W98 with 64MB RAM as first guest OS and WinXP with 192 MB RAM as second quest OS - it all works in real time with no problems at all (VirtualPC uses about 32MB RAM for itself, the rest is for emulated OS'es only).
The only problem for someone could be that it needs Windows system to run as a Host, but apart from that VMWare is way too expensive and is better in nothing, at least for me.
I've got a dual-boot machine (XP and Gentoo) but I do a lot of VB & VC development and that means Windows is essential.
However, I bought VMWare 4.0 last week and I'm highly impressed. I've set up a 5gb Fat32 partition for 'My Documents' which I share between XP and VMWare, so it's pretty transparent to me no matter which OS I boot. I put Win 98 into VMWare, but a quick test of XP shows that it works much better (the UI is faster, more responsive etc. I can tell W98 is running under something but XP looks like it's native)
I have a P4, 2.2ghz with 1gb of ram. Don't torture yourself trying to run this software on a P450 with 128 or whatever. If development pays your bills then a fast machine is a tool of the trade.
PS Bochs on the same machine ran about as fast as a dead snail. Took me 4-6 hours to install Win98 straight off CD.
Cheers
Simon
After reading this articles and all the comments I think I'll upgrade after all. I thought VMware 3 was quite fast but if this is supposed to be 30% faster that's great.
One comment on speed. Old VMware 3 is significantly faster in full screen mode. Does version 4 behave in the same way? In that case, that could account for the 30% increase that is mentioned.
Anyway, VMware regardless of version is a great tool when developing networked applications like chat clients etc.
A bit high price tag for home users perhaps, but if you
use it in your profession it soon saves you money instead.
Man, do you really know what you're talkinig about?
It's GTK, and not Motif. Don't belive me? try: ldd /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware and see if you find something like this:
libgtk-1.2.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgtk-1.2.so.0 (0x401b3000)
So, VMWare 4 is not using Motif crap any more, finally..
Hetz
Is the reviewer sure he is running VMWare 4.0?
Let's compare the screen shots from the reviewer:
http://img.osnews.com/img/3863/vmware2.jpg
and the VMWare website:
http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop/img/ws4_large4.gif
The look is very different. Also, if you look in the menus, you'll notice that the VMWare website screenshot has a menu item for "Snapshot". That menu item is missing from the reviewer's screen shot.
The reviewer's screenshot looks exactly like VMWare 3.x.
Here's what I suspect happened. The reviewer installed VMWare 4.x, but it did not uninstall VMWare 3.x. VMWare 4.x updated the kernel module, so running either VMWare 3.x or 4.x would be faster because of the new improvements in VMWare 4.x. The reviewer ran VMware through the command line (or a shortcut) that pointed to the old VMWare 3.x install instead of the new VMware 4.x install.
Essentially, the reviewer might have been running a hybrid of the VMWare 3.x application with the VMWare 4.x kernel module.
Roberto, could you check to see it this is the case? If so, I doubt you'd be the only one to experience this. You might have found a potential trap for users who upgrade to VMWare 4.x.
I generally avoid these sorts of problems by downloading the TAR.GZ packages instead of the RPM packages. Although not as convenient as the RPMs, the TAR.GZ packages give you more control where you can put VMWare, so you know exactly what you're running and what's being overwritten.
I actually have to comment about three things.
1. The Bochs/Win4Lin/VMWare comparison is not an indication that the reviewer is not technically inclined. It is not a comparison of technologies, but a comparison of solutions. How do I commute to work? I can take a ferry, a bus, a train, ride bike, or walk. There is no similarity in the implementation, but they all provide a solution. Stop whining.
2. Portability. This was not mentioned, but it is a great strength. For example, a virtual machine in VMWare is just one big file (not counting config files - don't whine!) I can make a copy of this file, experiment with my virtual machine until it is in shambles, and just revert to the copy for my original environment. Also, if I don't want to use VMWare on system A and want to use it on system B instead, I can just copy the vm file and I have the entire vm on B as it was on A.
3. VMWare almost gives you the real thing. At work, I use Lotus Notes under Wine, but if I wanted to access it from home, I must use a VPN client (with SecurID generated passcodes) which cripples a user's system by not allowing any local communications, only VPN communications (you lose any local access to smb shares, cannot ssh to local machines, etc.) This VPN client doesn't work with Wine (it acts as a network adapter in Windows) and probably not with Bochs or Win4Lin. So, my guest OS gets crippled, but I can keep doing everything in my host, Linux, even running a sniffer to see why VPN sometimes fails (no, I can't see the encrypted packets, but I can see isakmp and esp negotiations).
IMHO, VMWare is not for everybody, only for those who have specialized needs.
> Why wouldn't you spend less than half of that money on a new hard drive and dual boot isntead?
--It's great for "trying out" new operating systems. I run vmware from Linux host and can have Windows 98SE or ME running simultaneously without formatting my hard drive or rebooting. Vmware virtual disks can be scsi or ide, but to the host OS they're just files on your existing filesystem. However, you can also give vmware sessions access to existing physical disks and partitions.
--I bought vmware at first because I didn't want to re-do my Win98 installation on C:. Instead I stayed in Linux and did the install in Vmware. Now if there's a website that linux-native Opera can't handle, (I have problems with some Flash or Java sites, for example) I fire up vmware fullscreen, and view it from there. You can also cut+paste between host+vmware or between simultaneous vmware sessions.
--Another example: I got a free copy of WinME and vmware'd it to see if it was worth upgrading my C: install. (It isn't.) You can also duplicate your main install in a vm environment and see what the latest "security patches" from MS do to the system. ;-) VMware also has a nice roll-back feature that brings the virtual HD back to a saved state.
--One of my future plans is to have a BitTorrent session running in VM so that if I get hacked, only the VM will be affected - not my main machine.
--Another idea: Use vmware to see what the latest Knoppix CD looks like without having to reboot. I'm using vmware right now to test the new DVD beta without having a DVD burner, since you can boot from an ISO image.
--Note: I believe vmware offers a 30-day free trial, so if you've been wanting to check it out I suggest you do so!
I keep seeing posts about "you can buy a second computer for less than the prive of VMWare". Perhaps, but can you buy 5 computers for less than the price of VMWare? It is not restricted to one session. I have hosted in Linux while running a Windows VM and a FreeBSD VM. If you have enough RAM, you can run many concurrent VMs. Of course, you don't have to run them concurrently. You can have 10 VMs and run any one of them. So, are we keeping count? Maybe a PC can cost less than VMWare, but can 10 PCs cost less?
