Which OS Makes the Best VMWare Host? 141
astrojetsonjr asks: "A few days ago, Trillian_1138 asked about running Linux on a laptop. Yagu started a thread suggesting the use of VMWare to allow running multiple flavors of Linux and Windows at the same time. Lots of readers then posted their success stories using VMWare . My primary machine is an IBM laptop and I'm getting ready to move to using VMWare to allow me run Linux, Solaris and Windows at the same time. First, what is the OS/distro with which you have had the best success hosting VMWare? Finally, what host OS install and setup tips do suggest?"
Priorities first. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Priorities first. (Score:1)
On the other hand, I run Debian on my T30, no acceleration on the video at all. It used to be working just fine, but somewhere along the way it stopped working and I never noticed it. VMWare runs just fine on that laptop.
Re:Priorities first. (Score:2)
The problem is that the card and/or drivers are very finnicky, so it's hard to get 3d and suspend to work at the same time. Unfortunately, the workarounds provided in the Windows drivers don't work for Linux, and the vendors of Designed For Windows hardware refuse to give us Linux people any love.
Re:Priorities first. (Score:2)
Re:Priorities first. (Score:1)
On the other hand, getting everything working with the NVidia drivers was trivial. Even suspend.
Re:Priorities first. (Score:1)
Then, after you've tried everything, you discover that there's a special patched hacked up driver just for that card. What a pain in the ass.
Do you have any more info? I'm afraid my google-fu isn't quite as good as I'd hoped.
Re:Priorities first. (Score:3, Informative)
All ATi chips before and including the r250 (ranging from the RADEON 7000 to the RADEON 9250) have open source drivers bundled with Xorg and the Linux kernel. All other ATi chips can be used with the binary drivers from ATi. The thinkpads I know have RADEON MOBILITY 7500 chips, so they are perfectly supported.
> On the other hand, I run Debian on my T30, no acceleration on the video at all. It used to be working jus
Re:Priorities first. (Score:1)
The driver's just fine. It's the installation that's a bitch. Pretty much your only tool is a HOWTO that's not entirely helpful when your working with an ATI laptop chip which identifies as two different (non-laptop) chips with different tools. And the only diagnostic is a si
Re:Priorities first. (Score:1)
I'm quite happy running Vmware on Ubuntu 5.10. My main goals were to get a certain Lexmark X125 printer/scanner to work properly and to access a remote network on a MS-only setup of VPN.
The printer driver hangs all the time under native windows XP, and watching the same happening inside the virtual machine was the last drop. It was cool to see that printer working (sort of) under linux after my failed attempts to get it to work using the normal drivers. All that Ubuntu needs to do is detect that there is s
Let me answer your question with a question (Score:5, Informative)
Which OS Makes the Best VMWare Host?
Why do you want to run VMWare? I have used both VMWare and qemu (as well as Xen, but I don't think that will work if you are interested in running Windows), and have found qemu to be the superior of the two. Sure, there is no built in GUI, but there are external 3rd party GUIs available if you want. Seriously, qemu makes networking much easier thatn VMWare does. No need to mess with modules (unless you want the accelerator, which I recommend), no need for services or daemons running like with VMWare. Additionally, it is open source, which I consider a huge plus. You can also emulate other CPUs. Want to emulate a PowerPC so that you can test compiling your app on FreeBSD on a PowerPC processor? How about Sparc? The *only* way in which I would see VMWare as being superior is if you are using one of their server consolidation products (GSX or ESX, I think). For workstation-level stuff, qemu is the way to go.
Don't forget coLinux (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, it is a Linux kernel patched to run under Windows.
Re:Don't forget coLinux (Score:3, Interesting)
The project is cool, but doesn't work very well and seems quite stale.
Re:Don't forget coLinux (Score:4, Informative)
Worked great last time I used it, although the configuration involved editing text files.
The last release came out in February. That's recent enough to indicate that it's still being developed.
Re:Don't forget coLinux (Score:1)
Yes: it's very tough to get up and running (I tried and gave up two or three times before I eventually got it all working to my satisfaction), but once everything's configured, it does exactly what it says on the tin.
The last release came out in February. That's recent enough to indicate that it's still being developed.
And the next release is imminent; version 0.6.4-pre2 was released for testing just five days ago. I'd
Re:Don't forget coLinux (Score:2)
Re:Don't forget coLinux (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Let me answer your question with a question (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Let me answer your question with a question (Score:5, Insightful)
What is it with people and their desire to try and disseminate your reason for having or wanting to, God forbid, purchased a software package. Mostly I hear it from people who -
- don't use VM's for business work
- don't like commercial software
- don't understand that time == money
- have more time on their hands than pending tasks
It's one thing to not want to purchase software, fair enough - but let's not try and stone people.
Fact is, vmware out of the "box" runs and runs very well. It's a dead simple system to use even with an unsupported distro like Slackware linux. It's $199 USD (for workstation) and the cost of the purchase is long forgotten after the ease of use has saved you many times more. There's a lot more "messing around" with other solutions. You can burn up $199 in wages in half a day.
The difference between a functional package and a usable -and- functional package often isn't a lot but it's a small difference that a lot of people are more than happy to pay for.
Re:Let me answer your question with a question (Score:2)
VMware server beta is free. Plus it competes with M$ VirtualPC. VMware as a company seems to be pushing standardization in VMs.
I got my VMware workstation license for free also, by going to some free seminar on vmware.
Re:Let me answer your question with a question (Score:2)
Re:Let me answer your question with a question (Score:2)
Re:Let me answer your question with a question (Score:2)
It's dead simple even on the command line. (I came in a bit later, before it was some odd interface).
The GUI's available make it fairly easy as well...
It really is fairly zippy...
Unfortunately, some of us often have to justify a purchase for even 10 or so measly workstations. Do this enough and you will undoubtly run into more questions and reports.
None the less, I've been fairly happy with qemu and I'll probably continue to use it. (That said I probably will look into how vmware is doin
Another Reason... (Score:2)
That being said, I've used QEMU and VMWare myself. I find VMWare to be faster, and even the w
Re:Let me answer your question with a question (Score:2)
Have you found a tutorial for networking in Qemu that actually works or is up to date?
vmware server or workstation? (Score:2, Interesting)
That comment made me want to cry! (Score:2)
http://ftp.x.org/pub/X11R6.8.0/doc/radeon.4.html [x.org]
I use a RADEON 9200 here at home because I use 3D in Linux and I don't want to use the binary-only driver, but at work I have an X600, which has perfectly good 2D, but only software 3D. I d
Under Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
However, to be honest, on a laptop it likely makes more sense to run the host as WinXP. With Linux hosting and XP in Vmware, you don't get hardware graphics acceleration (perhaps in either OS.) Linux and laptops are still not there yet, so you may as well use XP as the host OS and get full hardware support.
Re:Under Linux (Score:1)
And if your laptop's a more modern o
Linux host on T42 (Score:2)
Your point about framebuffer acceleration under Windows is well taken. However, the only thing I really need the XP VM for is IE...some wag built the corporate
Linux can be stripped down (Score:1, Interesting)
I've never used it under XP, and never on a laptop, but you might want to consider that with Linux you can tune everything (filesystems, kernel, etc), remove stuff you don't use (printer daemon, etc), etc.
Re:Linux can be stripped down (Score:2)
VMWare ESX (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.vmware.com/products/esx/ [vmware.com]
Re:VMWare ESX (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:VMWare ESX does run on IDE but not SATA yet (Score:2)
Sorry, ESX DOES run on IDE drives too (all those dev systems y'know) but SATA, alas is still not here yet.
Re:VMWare ESX (Score:1)
Re:VMWare ESX (Score:3, Informative)
ESX Server runs natively on server hardware, without a host operating system. The ESX Server virtualization layer is a highly compact and efficient operating system kernel entirely developed by VMware for optimum virtual machine performance. This allows ESX Server to fully manage the hardware resources and provide the highest levels of security and performance isolation. ESX Server also incorporates a service console based on a Linux 2.4 kernel that is used to boot t
Re:VMWare ESX (Score:2)
I'm reasonably sure this is marketing-speak for "ESX server is an application that runs on the Linux OS". Would it really be reasonable for VMWare to deal with all the low-level hardware driver crud when there's Linux right there?
Nope (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nope (Score:2)
Re:VMWare ESX (Score:2)
Re:VMWare ESX (Score:1)
So obvious (Score:1, Funny)
Re:So obvious (Score:2)
It depends... (Score:3, Interesting)
The core issue is which OS are you more familiar with? If that isn't an issue, then there are some benefits to the *nix side of things.
It's possible to get a linux install down to 200~ megs while only using 64 megs of system memory, which is a strong advantage. If I understand correctly ESX Server is essentially a very very thin linux distro. That should say something
I've also read of a perl script that can make hot backups of a Virtual Machine; while this is possible under Windows using commercial products, it's another thing to be taken into consideration.
Hope this helps
Re:It depends... (Score:2)
Which reminds me, is there any specialty linux distro in the works
Re:It depends... (Score:1)
ESX is not a linux distribution. ESX is its own kernel (VMkernel) that uses the ESX Service Console as a glorified boot loader. Once the VMkernel is loaded it takes over the hardware and turns the Service Console install into a semi-virtualized Linux install. What ESX does have is a Linux like environment to manage it and interact with it.
On my laptop.... (Score:3, Interesting)
So, as a Linux user, I run Linux as the host, and Windows XP & 98 as the guests.
That's my situation anyway. Things work fine on my laptop under Linux, and I hope my next laptop will be even better (since I'll be ditching ATI on the laptop for Intel (and a linux pre-install, which should give the "works with linux" guarantee even if I don't keep the original install around (plus, I get to give a distro money!)), which will likely make things even easier.)
Re:On my laptop.... (Score:2)
Re:On my laptop.... (Score:2)
That, it seems to me, is key: if possible, make the host OS the one you are most comforable or happy using, and the one where you're likely to do the most diverse set of random, general purpose computing tasks. If you love windows and resent having to use linux, pick a windows host. If you love linux, pick a linux host.
As a linux nut who both dislikes and is almost completely inept at using the windows interface, the choi
Depends on your hardware. (Score:4, Informative)
On the other hand, if you're running a laptop or have some high end video or hard disk that requires drivers not available for linux, you may find your performance better under Windows (again, depending on many things, like how you configure vmware and its use of hardware).
There's no perfect answer to your question. My plans for new LAPTOPS will be to run the native drivers with Win32 as the host. Custom build desktops, however, I may well run the opposite way.
Re:Depends on your hardware. (Score:2, Insightful)
The days of 'unstable Win32' died with Win9x and ME... 2000 and XP on supported hardware is just as stable as any other OS. Linux fans who claim otherwise (usually on the basis that they saw a friend's Windows system crash) have about as much credibility as the idiots who reflexively claim all kernel panics to be 'linux bugs'.
Re:Depends on your hardware. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Depends on your hardware. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Depends on your hardware. (Score:2)
HOWEVER...if you start actually using it day to day, you become vulnerable to many 0-day exploits (see the recent Word/rootkit issue) and so in practice you can end up with many problems through no fault of your own. If you think this isn't an issue for you, please note the many infections that have occured through non-obvious vectors (viewing
Re:Depends on your hardware. (Score:1)
Also, if someone demanding 'reliability' is going to view jpg and wmf files -- as a privileged user -- and listen to CDs with Autoplay=on (which was how the Sony rootkit spread),
Re:Depends on your hardware. (Score:2)
Linux and XFS (Score:4, Informative)
VMWare Server supports Ubuntu as a host. It's a little easier to setup XFS and VMWare on Ubuntu. VMWare server claims experimental support for Ubuntu Dapper. I am running it on two servers for testing and it is performing very well. As Ubuntu gains popularity, the choice may be clearer. For right now, Google University has more help for VMWare on Red Hat^W^WCentos than Ubuntu.
If your system is AMD64/EM64T, you may be tempted to load a 64-bit OS. Resist the temptation. VMWare now claims official support for x64 host operating systems, but in practice these are more trouble to get working than they are worth (MUI, authentication, and even stability can be problematic IMO). With hardware that supports 64-bit virtualization (many new Pentiums and Opterons), 64-bit guests can be run on both 32- and 64-bit hosts. Determining whether your CPU supports it is so difficult, VMWare made a tool to do it for you called the processor check utility. (It's about halfway down this page [vmware.com].) Down the road when 4GB+ is standard on laptops, VMWare's x64 support will probably be a lot better.
Re:Linux and XFS (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Linux and XFS (Score:4, Insightful)
Even worse story for crashes. I've had to go to backup many times because a heavily used system locks up and XFS gets into it's unable to find superblocks or another one of it's infamous cryptic, non documented bugs/errors. I don't recall ever having to do this on a ext3 system unless the disk went bad or it crashed multiple times without a fsck.
That said, XFS is an excellent choice is some areas, such as realtime (soft guarentee) systems, etc.
Re:Linux and XFS (Score:2)
Re:Linux and XFS (Score:2)
That said, both jfs and xfs are pretty comparable, save for xfs's storing data in the directory inodes, which can be a good space-saver.
Re:Linux and XFS (Score:2)
Looking at my mailserver [maildir], I'm pretty sure this is saving me quite a bit of space.
Re:Linux and XFS (Score:2)
Re:Linux and XFS (Score:1)
I can testify that XFS on my Debian Sarge kernel (2.6.8?) overwrote my mozilla bookmarks file with NULs when my computer crashed and had to be rebooted. Let's hope that never happens to the important files.
Ubuntu runs workstation and player fine too (Score:1)
I use the latest VMWare on the latest Dapper release from Ubuntu and have XFS for the filesystem. No issues at all, the install just has to compile a custom kernel module so you have to make sure you have gcc, make, and kernel headers. Otherwise, works great!
Re:Linux and XFS (Score:2)
--For a drop-in vmware solution, I'd recommend Ubuntu. Vmware has precompiled kernel modules for it; and it's debian-derived, which means all the apt-get goodness.
Depends on what you need... (Score:5, Informative)
VMware needs kernel hooks to provide its virtualization services. Under Linux, there are only a few supported Linux distros (and specific versions at that) that have pre-built modules installed as part of VMware. I run my personal VMware on an FC5 Linux host, and had to download an unsupported "patch" (from one of the VMware developers -- not even hosted on the VMware web site) to allow the vmware-config.pl script to build the necessary modules for my specific kernel. Every time I upgrade kernels, I must then rebuild the modules to get VMware working again. Also, under FC5 with SELinux enabled, I had to manually change the context of one of the VMware files after install before SELinux would even allow VMware to run. Under Windows, all of the above "just works".
Under Linux, I get better performance when running multiple VM's at the same time. I have had three 384MB VM's running at the same time, and because of memory management under Linux I only saw an increase of approximately 600MB vs. not running the VM's (no swap increase either). I also have better I/O performance as well. When installing the 3 VM's above, I had the CD's mapped to ISO files on the same disk that my VMware files were being created on. During the install, my load average was constantly around 15 and my system was definitely slower, but it was still functional. I have brought a Windows host (with enough memory to host both VM's fully in RAM -- no swapping) to its knees trying to install just 2 VM's simultaneously in the same way (ISO files on the same disk as the VMware files). It was so unresponsive, it took almost 5 minutes to bring up Task Manager to see what was going wrong -- and Task Manager didn't really show me what was wrong, just that the CPU was pegged and the VMware processes were doing all the work.
Emacs! (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Emacs! (Score:1)
Linux more responsive in my experience. (Score:1)
I've enjoyed using VMware at home and the office. I haven't had a chance to try Xen or qemu. Briefly, here's my experience:
At the office, I work with 5 quad processor (dell) servers with Gentoo Linux as the host running VMware GSX and 1 running VMware Workstation -- all guests are Windows 2k or 2k3. At home, I run VMware Player on Kubuntu, and VMware Server on a W2k3 server and a Gentoo server -- some guests are Windows, some are Linux.
Usually everything works great. The Linux host systems seem mo
Parallels Workstation on Mac OS X (Score:1)
QEMU on Gentoo Linux (Score:2)
You can save yourself the money and just use QEMU. It emulates a PC just fine and can run most anything as a guest. I use it for a Windows guest so I can write my book. Granted my workstation is a "bit" high end, but when I full screen it, it's just like running a real Windows box (shudder).
Trick is to make sure the KQEMU accelerator is loaded and running correctly.
Debian (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Debian (Score:2)
Linux as guest (Score:1)
The VMWare web site has info on this and on fixing other clock problems: http://www.vmware.com/support/kb/enduser/std_adp.p hp?p_faqid=1420 [vmware.com]
Re:Linux as guest (Score:2)
[ curious ]
Linux. I have no choice. (Score:2, Interesting)
After struggled for 1 week (trying to rebuild the windows install CD to include the driver, etc), I installed VMWare Server in linux, installed XP in a virtual machine directly accessing the harddisk, installed the SATA driver and eventually got a working windows which boot from BIOS.
http://f [mocasting.com]
Re:Linux. I have no choice. (Score:2)
a bootable floppy. You wasted way more time ($) than the
cost of a floppy (say $30).
Way more.
Re:Linux. I have no choice. (Score:2)
Linux makes for a better host.... (Score:3, Insightful)
If a usb device has no driver under linux then it can be passed straight through and driven by an os running under vmware (you have to unload native linux drivers for any device you want passed to vmware), the windows version works differently in that you must have a native driver installed before you can pass a device to vmware. This issue has manifested itself many times when we've been at customer sites and presented with a random usb device (usb to serial adapters mainly) for which windows requires extra drivers (and linux includes drivers in the default kernel).
Performance - networking runs much faster when vmware is running atop linux, this is especially important for me as i`m often doing pentesting which involves lots of network scanning...
Security - you can nat your windows images behind your base linux install, your base linux can have everything turned off to minimise the chances of it being exploited (windows will often not let you turn some services off)
And finally, try vmware server as opposed to workstation, you can run it headless and only attach a gui when you want one..
the real trick to any virtualization (Score:1)
your processor, gobs and memory and fast storage.
In VMware
---
Under Linux you would go to Edit -> Preferences -> Memory (tab)
and choose Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host ram.
this will greatly boost speeds as nothing is swapped to disk
---
to speed up your resuming of virtual machines you would go to
Edit -> preferences -> priority (tab) and uncheck Take
and restore snapshots in the background.
this one is significant for those vm i
VmWare (Score:1)
My experience is either (Score:1)
On it I ran 2 virtual machines, one with a full blown oracle installation on Linux running a 10GB database. The second VM was running W2K with apache/tomcat/jboss. I used this machine to teach loadtesting classes with this as the web/database server taking the load and it performed spectacularly.
At home I moved off of XP because I got tired of having to call Microsoft for reactivation keys and started running Linux. Whe
I concur, but favor the Linux host (Score:1)
Because I use a couple of apps that only run on M$IE, I loaded VMWare WS 5.5 and setup an XP guest...never saw ANY discernible performance impact. Later on, we solved the app dependency using the native Linux Citrix ICA client, but I still use VM for demos and training modules. This past week, we held a 3-day product training session that u
Re:I concur, but favor the Linux host (Score:2, Informative)
To get more accurate information you would have to look for (or perform) some well designed and run benchmarks. Determine which is your prefered Operating System. Also, find out if there are any functional limitations to VMWare on either of these platforms
A related question. (Score:1)
I was wondering if there are any solutions that let you switch quickly between OSs without all the overhead, sort of like hibernating one OS and dehibernating another?
VMware is free now! (Score:1)
Just when I was running out of rackspace! (and electrical outlets)
http://www.vmware.com/products/gsx/ [vmware.com]
Re:VMware is free now! (Score:2)
Not ask slashdot (Score:1)
Don't use primary PC (Score:2)
Note: this was for J2EE developemnt.
Re:syntax highlighting yes, IDE no (Score:2)
Re:VMWare on a laptop will choke (Score:1)
Performance evals with pre-release software can be problematic in general... and in the case of the current VMware "Server" pre-releases, you just need to look at their support forums to see that a) a number of users complain about disk performance, and b) that the product's DEBUG settings are forcibly in the ON state, which (it is claimed) is causing skewed performance results.
And then there is the notorious laptop disk [non]performance...
Re:VMWare on a laptop will choke (Score:2)
Re:VMWare on a laptop will choke (Score:2)
Re:VMWare on a laptop will choke (Score:2)
--Economical and practical also, from a $$/time POV. If you don't already have one, google for a Silicon Image IDE 133 PCI board and hook the drives up to that.
Re:VMWare on a laptop will choke (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:VMWare on a laptop will choke (Score:2)
Re:VMWare on a laptop will choke (Score:2)
You know what you doing.
Move all "zig".
For great justice.
Re:OS/2 (Score:1)
Serenity Virtual Server [serenityvirtual.com]
Allows you to run Windows, Linux and OS/2 as both a host and guest OS, and FreeBSD as a host-only OS.