Re: [PLUG] VMware Workstation 8 review

[Casey Bralla <MailList@nerdworld.org>]

On Saturday, January 28, 2012 08:28:30 AM Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 4:32 AM, JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org> wrote:
> > So overall, I'm disappointed.  All the reviews I've seen have been
> > great,
> > but for me and the stuff I actually use, it's either the same or
> > slightly
> > worse.  And the stuff I really wanted (easy remote GUI console) is for
> > my
> > purposes not there. :-(
> 
> Yeah, at home I've been using virtualbox.  It is free so you don't
> have to deal with limited features/etc.  No doubt for a datacenter it
> might not be the best choice, but for testing different
> configurations/etc it works fine.  It has the GUI, but also runs just
> fine headless, and gentoo includes some init.d templates to use to
> make it easy (just symlink a template initi.d and copy a template
> conf.d where you set the VM name, uid, nice, etc).  So, I prep VMs
> using the GUI and if one is a keeper for whatever reason I just set it
> up to run headless.  If I forget about it and reboot the system will
> pause it automatically (configurable with any of the power-off
> options).
> 
> Sometimes the modules are flaky, but I've rarely had issues with that.
> 


I run 23 virtual servers (mostly apache, but 1 postfix eMail server too) on a 
pretty under-powered triple core AMD w/ 4 Gigs of RAM.   I had started out 
using vmware's free server, but found the web-based interface really horrible.  
I've transitioned back and forth between VirtualBox and vmware once or twice 
when the one I'm using got me aggravated, but I've stuck with VirtualBox 
mostly.

VBox has a very nice GUI that can be easily accessed via remote desktop.  The 
VMs start and run headless without any difficulty.

The __ONLY__ thing I liked better about VMWare was the automatic startup 
capability for the VMs.  But I was able to create a simple bash script to do 
the same thing in VBox.

Also, VBox is being very actively developed, despite changing ownerships a few 
times in the last few years.  The free version of vmware was pretty old and 
seemed very stale.

I had thought about trying to get VSphere running, but I couldn't even figure 
out their product offering lineup, since their product info web pages are so 
laden with marketing-speak (and the products are mostly non-free, of course)




Casey Bralla
Chief Nerd in Residence
The NerdWorld Organization
www.NerdWorld.org
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