Virtual machines gained popularity as a way to emulate Windows on Mac OS or Linux. Nowadays they're finding uses in testing, software development, server virtualisation, legacy applications, and many more. ZDNet Australia looks at the two most popular packages.
Virtual machines are certainly not going to be everyone's cup of tea. In fact, if you don't need to run multiple operating systems or are not a techno freak then you should probably skip ahead to the next article.
So who will typically want to use virtual machine (VM) software? For instance, a software developer in the early stages of the development may wish to test the code on some basic operating system setups, say Windows 98SE, ME, 2000, and XP. Now you could try and set up a few PCs with multiple boot options but it's a bit of a pain waiting for the system to reboot and start up the new OS each time you want to test a slice of code. With several virtual machines running on a single host PC you can simply move back and forth amongst the various OSes with the quick and simple click of a mouse.
You may not even be a developer, it could simply be that you like to use applications and tools that are only available under specific operating systems. Some may run under Windows, while others may only be available under Linux. Or you may have upgraded to Windows 2000 or XP only to find that a vital business application will only run under Windows 95 or DOS.
With either of the following applications, Connectix Virtual PC or VMware Workstation, you can have a host PC running either Windows or Linux with the other less frequently used OS running in a virtual machine window.
And, the good news is that both virtual machine applications are surprisingly fast and generally robust. Indeed, both vendors appear to have approached the problem from the same basic specifications; the similarities in features and functionality far outweigh the differences.
Our host PC used in the testing was a Dell Optiplex GX240 with a 1.7GHz Pentium 4 processor, 512MB of DDR memory, and a 32MB ATI Rage 128 Ultra graphics card running Windows XP Professional.
Pros and cons
It was interesting that while both applications were similar there are some quite significant advantages and disadvantages with each. In general VMware was the fastest in our benchmarks under Windows 2000 running in a VM, but the performance advantage in general was not that great. In terms of disk performance, Virtual PC was actually faster, but VMware had the edge in graphics and business application performance. In both cases we had configured the foreground VMs for maximum performance, but it appears that VMware's code is slightly more efficient or that it allocates a little more CPU time to the VM than Virtual PC.
Virtual PC on the other hand was the more robust of the two applications. Everything ran first time every time without the need to tweak or reload. VMware on the other hand refused to install Winbench99 V2.0 at all, and we had to resort to the previous V1.2 and then upgrade. We also had problems with the audio and COM port configurations in VMware, whereas Virtual PC's audio and COM ports were up and running from the word go. The only feature we would have liked to see in Virtual PC was the provision for USB ports straight out of the box. Another advantage we feel Virtual PC has over VMware is the consistent emulation of known hardware standards. The graphics emulation for example is the S3 Trio 32/64 and the audio is Sound Blaster 16 or AWE 32. This should make it a lot easier to install operating systems not supported by the vendor as you can simply select a known driver rather than try and get something to run with VMware's proprietary graphics driver, for example.
So in the end we feel Virtual PC is the best bet: it's solid, reliable, and--while not quite as fast as VMware--is certainly no slouch either.
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