[Nottingham] Some fun with the "free" VMware Player

[Martin Garton]

On Wed, 2005-12-21 at 10:41 +0000, Michael Erskine wrote:

> I don't know if anyone else is having a bash at this: I saw an article on 
> RootPrompt yesterday afternoon about running multiple operating systems with 
> VMware (http://RootPrompt.org/article.php3?article=9497 --> 
> http://linux.wolphination.com/?p=18).

Although not quite as fast as vmware, I have been using qemu for much
the same thing for a while, and I prefer it because it is open source.
(and I even fixes a big in an old version, yay!)

http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/

It is primarily an emulator rather than a virtualiser which has the
advantage of running guests for different architectures than the host,
but has the disadvantage of being quite a bit slower.

However, there is a virtualisation kernel module plugin available for
the x86 on x86 case which makes things much faster.

At work, I use a win2k VM for testing our web apps for IE compatability.
It is perfectly useable.

I think qemu is a very good alternative to vmware because it is free in
both senses. (the virtualisation module is currently non-free, but has
source available which is better than nothing.)  Also, qemu can work
from vmware disk images apparently.

-- 
Martin.