[plug] VMWare rocks

[Colin 't Hart]

Hi all,

Just been playing around with VMWare a few days. The beta is available
from http://www.vmware.com/

I was sceptical when I saw the announcements about a month ago, but
these have vanished completely. It is an amazing piece of engineering,
and well thought out too.

I tested it on a K6-2/300 that we have at work. It also has 128Mb RAM
and a G200 video card running at 1280x1024 @ 32bit.

Anyway, I have installed that NT thing from Redmond under it (VMWare).
I created a 500Mb file that acts as a container for the disk partition
(Drive C) for NT. One cool feature of VMWare is that the file only grows
as the disk is used! There must be some smarts to detect what is an
empty disk even if formatted. Maybe a simple RLE compression type
scheme.

Anyway, while installing NT I had 64Mb RAM allocated to VMWare, but
after install I have managed to boot NT all the way down to 8Mb! VMWare
allows 4Mb increments of RAM size for the virtual machine. Oh yeah, I
tried 4Mb but I got a BSOD -- in a window :-)

VMWare have produced two tools that are to be used under the guest OS.
The first is a small app that runs in the desktop tray (that recessed
area next to the clock in the taskbar for all you Linux people who don't
know anything about that other OS) which allows configuration of some
VMWare settings.
The second is an NT SVGA screen driver which doesn't talk to any
hardware but rather talks directly to VMWare for output to a window.
Apparently a 95/8 SVGA screen driver is also available.
Also apparently, a patched X Server allows hardware acceleration of the
video card to be taken advantage of.

What else to say?

Oh yes, you can run in full screen mode. It is very uncanny to see NT
boot in full screen mode under Linux. It's almost like pulling faces at
Bill.

Performance is good, especially with the SVGA driver supplied by VMWare.
The only negative point is that the mouse often lags. Perhaps a mouse
driver that received events from the X mouse would be helpful here in
the same way that the screen driver is.

Running 95 (and I think 98) requires RTC (real time clock) support
compiled into the kernel.

Networking works well -- the guest OS requires a separate IP to the host
OS if you want it to look like a separate machine (so-called "bridged
mode") which is the normal mode of operation. Host-only mode allows
network comms to the host OS, which must then masquerade if further
network participation is required. Kernel modules take care of the
bridging and putting the ethernet device into promiscuous mode to handle
multiple IP addresses on the physical card.

Raw hard disk partition support is also there, but only on IDE drives.
What this means is that if you currently have a dual-boot box you can
boot the other OS inside VMWare directly of its own partition... Caveats
though: only standard (S)VGA is emulated in the VMWare virtual machine
so you should disable any advanced video drivers in the other OS first
(if necessary). Also, the ethernet device emulated by the virtual
machine is an AMD PC-Net II (whatever that is... NT found it straight
away), so your normal network driver will not work in this case.

Sound is supported by emulating a SoundBlaster something. I haven't
tried it.

I think that about covers it.

Oh. It's not free. Beta licenses last 30 days and can be renewed when
they expire; at version 1.0 the product will cost US$299, which is
regarded by some as too much. Others say that if you only want to play
games, you are better off rebooting to 95/8, and that if running
commercial apps in an office environment, US$299 is a small price to pay
for the improved productivity afforded by a Linux workstation. I can
only hope that my boss thinks the same way.

Cheers,

Colin