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 TEST CENTER VMware opens way to virtual worlds By P.j. Connolly September 28, 2001 FOR MANY BUSINESSES, the next several months will be less about making it big and more about making do. Because many employees, such as developers, salespeople, and training staff, require the use of several OSes, IT managers looking to save cash should consider consolidating their operating systems at the desktop. Indeed, installing multiple OSes on one computer can save a bundle in hardware and support expenses.
Even with OSes such as Windows 98 and Windows 2000 Professional, which can share the same partition, users often hit frustrating walls when installing new software. Upgrading to Windows XP, for example, could prove laborious, time-consuming, and ultimately unsuccessful due to conflicts between the two commingling systems. Adjusting these situations for success sometimes requires reloading every scrap of data onto the system. Enter VMware's VMware Workstation 3.0, beta, which allows users to run virtual environments inside a primary OS, offering a compelling solution to the problems of dual-booting. With VMware, a developer running Red Hat Linux, for example, could create "VMware worlds" running Linux distributions from Caldera or SuSE for cross-vendor testing. An upper-level help desk employee could create a number of different Win9x worlds to duplicate various user configurations. VMware supports a wide variety of OSes, including MS-DOS 6, the latest Windows releases, and various iterations of FreeBSD and Linux. Thanks to this flexibility, the product can reduce corporate PC support hassles while offering the freedom to run applications in their native environment. And with a retail price of $299, VMware is certainly less expensive than a new PC. In our tests of a public beta version of VMware Workstation 3.0, we were impressed with the product's ease of use. The latest version adds a number of features sorely absent in current shipping code, such as USB and CD image support. And a number of significant performance enhancements, such as smoother mouse movement and faster disk I/O and video, were so profound that it was sometimes difficult to believe we were running Windows XP Professional inside Windows 2000 Professional. We performed our testing on a 650MHz PC with 256MB, which is a reasonable configuration for a developer or upper-tier support employee. VMware Workstation itself is fairly simple to install and begin using. Our only major complaint was with the network configuration, which didn't always play nice with our existing software. VMware adds two virtual network adapters to the host machine's network setup, which required some tuning to ensure that the virtual NICs (network interface cards) used the correct IP address and DNS information. On the positive side, adding a new OS to VMware is practically child's play compared to what previous releases required. It is now possible to give descriptive names to the various virtual PCs. A setup assistant or wizard (depending on your platform) walks you through basic configuration of the virtual PC, including memory and disk consumption. The guest OS is installed after the virtual machine is created. IT managers responsible for classroom or lab environments will appreciate VMware's capability for restricting access to the product's user interface. Locking down the virtual machine keeps configurations consistent and prohibits the creation of new virtual PCs. IT managers looking to run multiple environments on a single machine should deploy VMware Workstation when it ships later this year -- bearing in mind, of course, that they need a license from Microsoft for each Windows world they want to run. Still, for saving money in this tight economy, VMware beats your piggy bank. P.J. Connolly (pj_connolly@infoworld.com) covers groupware, messaging, networking, operating systems, and security for the Test Center.
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