grub's Journal: Virtual Machine advice please.

Once again I reach out to that vast pool of knowledge at slashdot...

Scenario: I have a couple of decent machines on the desktop at home. One is an AMD-2500xp+ running Win2000. It's used for games. The other machine is an AMD64-3800x2 (64 bit dual core thing) It's running Ubuntu. Rest of the place is all OpenBSD on various machines and one FreeBSD box.

I'm thinking that I really don't need to keep 2 machines running on the desk. Ideally I'd have some sort of VM manager running on the Linux AMD64 box which I could run a Windows VM in for when I need my gaming fix. I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions for a VM manager. I have only a few needs:

- It has to run a normal 32 bit Windows in a VM on this 64 bit box so I can reinstall Win2k on it or a copy of normal XP, not XP64.
- It must support the 3d capabilities of my graphics card (ATI 9800 Pro).
- It must support my Audigy2 sound card (no stuttering, etc)

I've looked at Xen but my processor lacks the AMD-V (nee Pacifica) goop to run Windows unmodified. QEMU and VirtualBox also look nice. So far, though, it looks like VMWare is the one to beat. I'm not shy about spending a few bucks to get it.

There you have it. All suggestions are appreciated.

Not good

[yamla]

VMWare is probably your best option but there's really no chance of playing anything much more complex than, say, chess inside the virtual machine. There's simply no chance of running any modern game. The 3D support is simply not there.

I have an X2-4800 with 4 GB of RAM and an nVidia 8800 GTX video card and the latest VMWare Workstation. I reboot back into Windows to play games.

That said, VMWare will almost certainly be plenty good enough to do word processing, Windows compiling, etc. etc. You may even

Re:

[yamla]

I should also note that VMWare is happy to give you a thirty day trial of at least some of their products. And I should point out that I really like VMWare, it's a great product. It's just no good for 3D gaming.

Re:

[grub]

Hi,

Yep, I have a demo of some sort of VMWare at home already. I haven't installed it yet as it's too easy to get caught in the "it's not perfect but I'll keep it because of inertia" trap. Hence my request for info before jumping in :)

VMWare claims they have some 3D support but your comment tells me it's pretty poor. Sigh, that could be a deal killer.

Thanks!

Re:

[yamla]

I think that's only for Fusion, their OS X product. And even then, that's only a subset of DirectX 8.1, not anything subsequent, and a VERY limited selection of games.

You may want to look at that wine offshoot that brought DirectX to Linux. I had a subscription quite some time ago. Getting games to run in it was a bitch and hardly anything worked but they've done a lot of work since then. May be an option.

Re:

[grub]

I'll look at that, thanks!

We have a 1 year old daughter (and are talking about #2) so my game time is pretty limited. When I want to play games, I want to play games, not screw around with config.this and config.that stuff. I have a modded xbox as well but Oblivion and jDoom don't work on it :)

Re:

[Randle_Revar]

wine offshoot that brought DirectX to Linux

That's Cedega, formerly WineX, from Transgaming. However, Wine has now done a lot of work on DirectX (including DX9), and I am not sure that Cedega has that much of an advantage over them now. I also got the impression that Cedega has more quick and dirty fixes to get specific games to work, while Wine is more about doing things the "right way", giving it a more solid base.

Anyway, Wine is more than good enough to run Starcraft and Civ3, which is all I really care a

Re:

[snickkers]

Everything Randle_Revar said is true, and same with what other people are saying. As far as actual VM's go, you simply won't get 3d accelleration (or at least, only very limited). I believe DirectX 10 hardware takes a step in the direction to allow possible VM direct usage of video card capabilities, but so far that hasn't been taken advantage of and probably won't for a long time yet. But, there is Wine and Cedega. If it's only for gaming that you're after, I do highly suggest Cedega. Like RR said, it'

Re:

[nizo]

First, look again at the vmware site; they offer the player and the server (get the server, with free serial numbers) freefreefree. Both of those products kick ass.

Sadly, as far as I know you can't play any 3d games in vmware :-( But I run photoshop, illustrator, poser, vue, etc etc etc all perfectly fine.

For gaming you might take a look at Cedega [transgaming.com] which is basically a modified version of wine geared towards gaming. Look at the list of supported games and see if what you want to play is supported. I have bee

VMWare is the greatest

[Mantorp]

but not for games. I was hoping to use it to prevent having a zillion of my daughter's games installed on my PC, but it doesn't have the graphics support you need to run anything.

Ask Mr. Virtualizer (that's me)

[eno2001]

Actually the state of 3D gaming in VMs is pretty sad right now. I've been looking around myself and there are multiple issues:

1. Most of the non-VMWare virtualizers on Linux are based on QEMU. That includes Xen, KVM and a few others. As a result the VM is given a virtual Cirrus logic 2D card from circa 1995.
2. I did run into a thread at one point between the QEMU developer (Fabrice Bellard) and a hacker who planned to implement some calls from QEMU to some portion of the 3D backend in X (maybe?). Fabric

Re:

[nizo]

Have you looked at Cedega [transgaming.com] ?

Re:

[eno2001]

I've used it. I had some success with things like Max Payne, Myst III: Exile, that I couldn't pull off with pure Wine (copy protection issues that will never be open source and the "no CD" cracks didn't work for me). It provides you with an OK way of running newer Windows games at native speed. The only issues I have with it are that it's hit or miss and that they focus solely on what's popular. For example, Myst III wasn't actually on the list when I last looked. I just prodded it to work and it only

Virtual machines

[Tet]

VMWare is pretty good, but as others have said, you won't get 3D support working. Xen rocks... almost. Performance is significantly better than VMWare. And it's great... right up until it isn't. And then you're really screwed. I had numerous problems with it corrupting it's temporary storage, and with memory management issues, which necessitated a reboot of the hypervisor, thus taking down all of the Xen guests. There is precisely zero support available[1] -- not even a knowledgebase of common problems on t

Re:

[eno2001]

Re: Xen

I think it also depends on what you plan to run on it. In my case the Xen system is built from sources (not using Portage) on a 64-bit Gentoo system on an AMD64 +4200 Dual Core with 4 gigs of RAM. Keep in mind this is for "production" stuff at home. What I have had on it since last August:

1. Old VM migrated from a real box in 2004 to QEMU, then from QEMU to Xen with 128 Megs of RAM. It provides: HTTP (Apache) for internal and external use for personal pages I host, a private Jabber server for my