Arstechnica covers the basics of set up, OS installation and support, performance, and also benchmarks the two applications on the host machine. Virtual PC vs. VMware: which VM cuisine will reign supreme?
Virtual machine shootout: VMware vs. Virtual PC
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The article should, of course, mention that Virtual PC is alive and well on the OS X platform as well.
Then again, VPC requiring only 32MB (on a PC) must be a joke, my personal experience (on a Mac) is that 256MB is enough but 512MB is recommendable.
Just installed SuSE Linux Professional 9.1 on Virtual PC 2004 on my slow laptop (P3 800 Mhz, 384 MB) running Windows XP Professional. The installation took well over 6 hours, but thankfully I didn’t have to stare at it all that long. Now that I boot into the fresh OS, there is no network connection, nor sound 🙁 I guess I have to try some other live distro to find out if it is possible to have these peripherals working under virtual PC, else I’m going to have to look into VMWare (which unfortunately, does not offer a student license for free unlike microsoft…)
When will VMWare support FreeBSD as an official host?
I much prefer VMware over Virtual PC – although I did start out using Virtual PC long before I knew anything of VMware. In my experience, VMware is a lot faster than VPC, I would say that 50% of my time is spent doing stuff in an emu-enviroment. I’ve never had a problem with Win 95, 98SE, ME, 2K, XP, 2K3 or Red Hat. I’ve even managed to get Solaris 9 for x86 installed!
It’s hard to judge though, VPC is cross platform and it’s handy being able to take a emu-machine with you if you need to use a Mac at anytime, then have it work on a PC a bit later.
VMware on the other hand is fast, I like the interface and some of the stuff VMware are coming out with makes the mind boggle! Just look at Virtual SMP or VirtualCenter. I mean DUDE!
Don’t forget though that Virtual PC on PC and Mac are two totally different things. You’re not having to emulate an entire PC on the PC side whereas on the Mac side you’ve got a lot more to do. Not to mention OS X needs 128MB of ram just for itself.
“Officialy”, I don’t know, but I think that people has been able to run it with pretty much success, of course, unofficialy
Don’t count on it.
I was considering a similar article to ARS, but based on actual user tasks rather than benchmarks.
What prompted me to consider the article was the excessive dispartity in performance under VPC compared to VMware when running non-MS operating systems. It took 7 times longer to install FC-1 on VPC than it did on VMWare. It made no difference whether this was from ISO images on HD or the FC1 install DVD I got from a magazine. There was no such difference with MS operating systems, causing me to wonder if VPC had been *tweaked* to show non-MS products in a bad light.
In the end, after replicating the issue on 3 machines, my only conclusion was that I had too much time to spare and that I was getting tired, and that it was probable due to MS driver emualtions – same as suspected by ARS.
I much prefer VMWare for the additional functionality and wider range of support OSs. Simple things such as being able to split the Vdisk into 2gb chunks for easy backup/copying around, or eveb use raw disk for improved performance just make this a much more polished product.
The article should, of course, mention that Virtual PC is alive and well on the OS X platform as well.
It does precisely that in the first sentence of the Virtual PC portion, albeit only in passing.
4.5.2 has support for FreeBsd. It’s not marked “experimental” (like longhorn).
4.5.2 has support for FreeBsd. It’s not marked “experimental” (like longhorn).
He asked about FreeBSD as a host, not guest OS. (He wants to run VMware *on* FreeBSD, not FreeBSD *in* VMware)
lately ive been very impressed with QEmu. once they get a good frontend onto it, QEmu will be a very good contender.
It is great to see virtualization technologies moving into the mainstream IT/OS news coverage.
I have used both products mentioned in the article, and I must agree that Vmware reigns supreme for hosting non-microsoft operating systems.
Oh & Setting up a virtual network on a 2 gig system is sweet.
VMWare’s virtual disks (or COW files as they’re called internally) don’t store identical blocks more than once. The FS of the file is a heirachial hash, so if you write 10,000 identical blocks (say when you’re formating the disk) it will only store that block once. It also has special encodings for a few common blocks (all zeros, all ones, F0F0, F1F1, etc). So you get added performance that way too.
There was no such difference with MS operating systems, causing me to wonder if VPC had been *tweaked* to show non-MS products in a bad light.
Can’t be. I’ve used VPC on Windows, the latest version before MS bought it, and it got the same problem.
Actually, FreeBSD runs Vmware 3 and I want to run 4.5.2…
I’m using VMWare on a Linux host with Win2k as a guest to do ASP.Net and SQL server programming. It works great! Performance is great! I’m very happy with this setup.
Hardware is a 1.33 gHz PIII Tulatin celeron with 512k sdram running Gentoo Linux.
Probably the best part is I don’t have to have dedicated windows hardware standing around just for this one project.
Daren