Re: [PLUG] VMware Workstation 8 review

[JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org>]

Thanks to everyone for the feedback.

Rich, as for VirtualBox, I've tried it in the past and mostly liked it, 
but we use a lot of VMware at work so it makes sense to stay in the family.

I also *really* like the "snapshot trees" you can create using VMware 
Workstation.  I'm not sure VBox was as good last time I ran it, but it's 
been a couple of years now, so that probably is better.

Baskar, one of these years I'll get around to doing a deeper dive on the 
KVM/QEMU/whatever stuff.  I have a project or two in mind for that.  All 
I need is time...

Casey, the VMware "Server" 1.x and 2.x problems are End-of-Life and 
increasingly hard to get to compile on "modern" distros.  1.x was 
awesome, and basically has the headless/awesome remote far GUI I love 
(but lacked snapshot trees).  I still have that on a CentOS-5 machine or 
two and it works, but I'm sure it'll fail on CentOS-6.  2.x was 
terrible; I never even get that crappy web GUI to ever work and I never 
used it.

Pat, the last time I tried the free ESXi stuff, I was unable to get it 
to do anything useful.  And I don't even see the "free" download 
anymore, though I spent almost zero time looking.  I get ESXi 4 to run, 
but actually doing anything useful with a VM seems to require a whole 
bunch of *very* not-free stuff.

Also, Workstation is really the correct VMware product for me to be 
using, for the tasks I need to do.  My main disappointment was the fact 
that I still need to waste resources running a GUI on the host server, 
and it's harder to get a remote view of things (e.g., to copy&paste 
stuff) from my Windows $WORK machine.  Vino on the xUbuntu host side and 
TightVNC on the Windows side *work*, but a VMware fat GUI would have 
worked a lot better because it's tied directly to the virtual hardware.

For reference, my host is a Dell PE R200 with 8G RAM and 2x 750G drives 
in RAID1.  I've run probably 6-8 concurrent VMs, but most of those are 
CentOS CLI only with 512M, 720M or 1G RAM.  Right now I have 2x Ubuntu 
(with GUI) 1 Windows and 1 CentOS running, all of which work great.

Thanks,
JP
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP            |:::======|      http://bashcookbook.com/
My Account, My Opinions     |=========|      http://www.jpsdomain.org/
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implemented self, while the overhead incidentally flattens Moore's Law.
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