Virtually Machining
Posted on November 4, 2005
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Many moons ago, I used to use VMware all the time to mess around with various OS’s and apps. Why? Well, instead of cobbling together yet another machine full of spare parts, why not “virtualize” your existing machine to act as if it is 2? or 3? VMware (or Virtual PC) set up a complete blank virtual environment, ready for an OS and apps to be installed. Heck, I’ve had one “real” machine running 4 or more “virtual” machines — networked and communicating with each other. Or, as another example, when I was a linux only guy, there wasn’t a really good way to run QuickBooks, so I had a VMware install of win98 and QuickBooks. Kinda overkill to boot an entire “virtual” OS to do the book keeping, but it worked and served the purpose. As I wanted to play with other stuff, I’d just try it out virtually first. And… vmware was easily…. uh… borrowed… back then.
Flash forward a bit: I got a MSDN subscription a few years ago and it included Microsoft’s Virtual PC. Well heck, now I could experiment and use different OS’s legally! So, I retired my *borrowed* VMware install and switched over to Virtual PC. They basically do the same things, just a little differently. Well, and Virtual PC doesn’t have a Linux version, like VMware does… Anyways, Virtual PC has served the need for the last couple of years.
Now, this week I wanted to get CentOS going so I could try out some stuff with linux. Created a new Virtual PC image for it and did the install (side note: with both VMware and Virtual PC, you can use .iso files as opposed to actually having to burn (and waste) the CDs for an install. VERY handy for linux distros!). Install finished up, but wouldn’t completely boot properly. Oh no… not working quite yet. Tried the CentOS 4.1 work around, but I think it was too late — I was already past that point with 4.2.
So, about this time I recalled recently reading about VMware’s new Player. You can install it and run pre-existing VMware images, just can’t create new ones. Did I mention it is free? Oh - and you can d/l a 30 day trial of the full VMware Workstation. So… unless I’m missing something, I have 30 days to build a few useful images and then I switch over to the player to continue to use ‘em? Oh, and they have some nifty stuff pre-built and ready to go as well. Like… I just got a virtual machine with Redhat Enterprise 4 already installed. Sweet!
One thing I noticed right-off the bat though. My virtual machines under VMware sure seem to run a helluva lot faster than they do with Virtual PC. Can’t quantify it (can I ever?) but boy, CentOS sure seems to boot WAY faster.
Tags: linux, virtual-PC, vmware
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can you confirm that you can create saveable and runnable VMWare images with the 30day download? I can’t wait to try this. will have feedback tomorrow.
Definitely could when I wrote this post, yep. Haven’t tried since then, but I can’t imagine things have changed.
Or there’s this option as well.
Thanks for the info and the link. I’ve got one VM image up (Ubuntu) and running and will work on the 2nd one (CentOS). Good luck. great page. worthy of a digg.