On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 09:43:39PM +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Thu, 2006-09-07 at 11:32 +0100, cl@isbd.net wrote:
Does anyone here have any experience of doing this? In particular how good is the hardware support for Win2k in VMware, I want to be able to use a scanner from Win2k in particular. =
I have never used VMware on BSD but I use the Workstation version pretty extensively on various flavours of Linux.
I have also in the past used the previous Server versions for large scale DRP projects (and in one instance for live DR)
Vmware support for W2K is pretty much perfect. It comes with drivers to assist performance in the virtual machine (although pretty much everything will work without them)
What you do need to be aware of is that the free server product is optimised for network and background services.
For optimum desktop performance you really need the workstation product. (that said there should be nothing stopping you from building an image in the trial workstation or free server products and then running it in the free player)
I am not sure what the support for external hardware is like on the server product (I don't think it supports all the port loop-throughs that the workstation products support)
It is possible to connect a scanner via USB to a virtual machine, however you will only get USB1 and there are some gotcha's (at least on the workstation products I can't remember how it works on the server versions) In that the virtual machine only sees the usb device if it was the active window when the device was plugged in. This is by design to allow you to choose whether the host or one of the guests sees the device you are trying to use.
Parallel port scanners are a no-no and SCSI scanners probably ditto (VMware does support SCSI but AFAIK only for disk/tape access using pass-through drivers)
Thanks for all the info.
It seems to me that I'll take a "suck it and see" approach after getting the new hardware. If Vmware doesn't work for me then I've lost nothing and can just use the new machine in the way I'm using my present one.
I probably don't need "optimum desktop performance", I do nearly all my Linux work in rxvt terminal windows on an fvwm2 desktop. I use very, very few true GUI applications on Linux. The only major one is Firefox really.