Not sure if I need Vmware or Virtual PC or something else, but I'm looking to run Windows 2003 standard virtually on a Windows XP PC for testing purposes.

Any ideas which i need? Cheers

Vmware or MS Virtual is what you need...

Are there open source virtual machine type apps out there? Or do you have to buy these things?

I've been using Virtual Server 2005, but thats really for data centres where you can run multiple vm's on a decent box (blade servers etc) Its pretty good from what I've seen so far, have got a full test environment up on one box, running 3 win2k3 vm's. I get it with a MSDN subscription, not sure how much it is to buy though.

Are there open source virtual machine type apps out there? Or do you have to buy these things?

There's bochs and xen.

I don't think either of them are as good as VMWare, which appears to be the best emulator in terms of features and performance, but they're probably worth a look.

The IT dept at the place I'm contracting to have gone nuts with this stuff. I'm still not entirely confident of the reliability of a bunch of virtual servers running on the one box. I can certainly see the benefits in creating virtual environments for testing and UAT, but running multiple production servers on the one box makes me nervous.

and plex might be of interest too

Cheers, thanks Trog. I thought I'd have a play and see how they work... Do you guys use VM stuff for your servers?

Just for development and testing, nothing production related. I believe performance under VMware is really good, actually.

VMWare also have a (relatively) new thing called VMPlayer - a free VM thing that you run and you can just download 'images' of various operating systems and applications. Worth a look, you can basically just install the free player and then fire up a bunch of different apps/OSes without having to do installs or anything.

There was a secure browsing one which looked pretty cool; I tried it but it was too slow (in terms of how long it took to boot) to be really practical for me to be interested in.

trog I guess now is as good a time as any to inform you that your desktop is actually in a VM


we do use VM's for production though, but not much yet and only for low-load tasks so far

That explains why its so sluggish, I just thought it was mcafee

Is this a tentative test to see if they're up to the task? (I doesn't matter if Trog loses everything).

The IT dept where I'm at seem to think it's going to solve all their problems. "If it a server goes down, it can automatically keep going on another machine!", which sounds to me like a cluster, but a virtual one. I get the distinct impression they have no idea what they're doing.

I've had a play with Bochs, and it seems pretty good. I've downloaded the VM Player thing, and I'm going to give running ubuntu linux through it, once I've downloaded the 500meg image...

There are guides on how to create virtual-machines for use by the free VMWare Player without having to buy VMWare itself.

You can either:

1. Use a text-editor and modify an image config file, or
2. Over-write a freely available existing image, or
3. Use QEMU to build a VM image from scratch.

Many options and they are pretty easy to do! Here are some guides:

Text-based config example for a Windows XP Guest Image
Creating a Gentoo Linux Image
Modifying a pre-existing sample Image

Enjoy!


last edited by parabol at 01:20:41 21/Mar/06

There's bochs and xen.

I don't think either of them are as good as VMWare

In terms of performance, Xen can currently run a virtualised Linux close to native speeds. It is much faster than VMWare.

Once Hardware Virtualisation is supported by AMD (supposedly when socket AM2 comes out), Xen will allow you to run Windows and Linux side-by-side.

I can't wait for that day. Xen is some awesome software, although it has some stricter requirements than the general purpose VMWare.

The performance graph from the Xen page you linked to:

http://homepage.powerup.com.au/~boldajis/images/comparison.gif

(Relative performance on native Linux (L), Xen/Linux (X),
VMware Workstation 3.2 (V), and User Mode Linux (U))


last edited by parabol at 01:31:30 21/Mar/06

i am running a vmware esx and gsx test lab at work currently, to determine if it will meet our requirements for app dev and also some production needs.

theres no way I would run production servers on vmware workstation, its too slow and wobbly. ESX however is another kettle of fish... its fantastic.

I have built a cluster of medium spec servers (P4 xeon 2.8ghz, 1gb ram) on ESX, and have been playing with vertical silo clusters, where a virtual machine is run as a vertical rather than horizontal cluster... ie the VM runs on multiple servers in the cluster simultaneously, so if one piece of hardware in the cluster fails, the remaining servers just pick up the processing and memory tasks for the failed box.

Download vmware server for free - http://www.vmware.com/products/server