On Sun, 2002-07-14 at 20:12, Chris Hellyar wrote:
> Are there any users of VMware on the list who use it day to day? ie:
> running Office 2K or similar under windows 2k or 98 on a LAN,
>
> I've installed the demo, and I'd be quite keen to use it full time if I can
> get a feeling for the stability of the beast... It is a little pricey, but
> it appears to be very good software, the downloaded demo works well, and
> I've got win98 happily running on a test machine at work, under RedHat.
>
> So, anyone with a bit of time on the clock want to comment on it's stability
> or otherwise?
I'm running the newest VMware 3 under debian. It works very well.
There are some things that confuse it
1) the compaq floppy disk creating dos software, which returned
"unimplemented functions"
2) Sometimes the WinNT 4 vm refuses to read a floppy disk, but the win98
machine can read it fine.
3) WinXP needs re-registering if you change the amount of ram allocated
to the virtual machine.
4) Video performance (even in full screen) is way lower than the native
machine. Its not really noticable for office-apps, but games and video
are slow.
5) You can only run as many virtual machines as you have physical ram
EVEN IF THE VMs DON'T USE IT ALL.
IE, 768 Mb ram allows you about 680 Mb to allocate to VMs - 512 for a
XP VM and 256 for a win9x VM and you can't run them both at once.
HOWEVER if your VMs aren't using much ram, it is still available for
linux apps:
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
27684 root 9 0 368M 368M 368M S 19.8 36.7 460:24 vmware
27696 root 1 -19 50616 49M 50252 S < 0.0 4.9 0:22 vmware
654 root 5 -10 193M 33M 13440 S < 0.4 3.3 13:46 XFree86
Theres two VMs running - 512 Mb and 256 Mb allocated, but still 560 Mb
in cacbe and buffers.
socks:/usr/tmp/body# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1029940 1005488 24452 0 141204 420756
-/+ buffers/cache: 343528 686412
Swap: 265064 0 265064
6) vmware runs nicely inside a Xvnc server, so other users can run a
session on your desktop, and access it via a vnc client. (not sure how
this affects licensing)
7) VMs are single CPU, even if the host is multiple.
If you're happy with the demo - the full product is just the same
without the 30 day problem. You don't even need to reinstall it....
and remember the download licence is cheaper than the full-product.
I got mine through Corporate Consumables in Chch.
