On Thu, Sep 14, 2006 at 01:27:54AM +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Thu, 2006-09-14 at 00:15 +0100, Mark Ridley wrote:
I'm thinking exactly the same thing. A slimline install of absolutely anything, but nice and secure, with a feature rich virtual Windows install... just kidding! :)
Although to some degree you could just put a skeleton OS on as the Host just to support the Virtual machines and then run your primary OS as a guest alongside any other guests you require. There are some problems with doing this.
This is the nitty gritty stuff that I want to know before committing *too* much time to this project.
Overall VMware's performance is perhaps 75% of the native machines performance (assuming one guest running..Server is supposed to cope better than workstation with multiple guests) Most of the performance differences are I/O bound because you are going through extra layers of abstraction. Later VT releases may help some of this.
75% is probably OK, my new machine is going to be a *lot* faster than my current ones.
You don't have full access to all your hardware from the VM guests. So hardware accelerated 3D is a no-no..Some I/O devices are a problem (USB1 speeds only, some bi-directional parallel devices are a pain, CD/DVD burning is not possible AFAIK) Device sharing between guests can be a problem as well.
3D is just about irrelevant, I don't run any games and very little in the way of graphically intensive programs.
However the other things may be an issue - I certainly do occasionally want to write CDs/DVDs and nearly always do it using Win2k as that's where the data I want to write is. Are you saying that I simply won't be able to do this if Win2k is running as a guest OS?
The USB1 speed may also be an issue, I'm not sure how my Epson V700 will go with only USB1 available.
Where can I find more definite information about this? (I'll have a hunt around the Vmware site anyway).
The guest OS's suffer media performance problems (I think these are even more of a problem on the VMware Server edition) certainly Sound and anything using Direct Video Rendering can be both latent and choppy on the Workstation version I use.
I very rarely use sound, I've never seen it as anything other than a distraction most of the time. I do very occasionally listen to streamed radio on the Internet though and may (or may not) do some LP to CD transfers.