VMware V3.2
Installing VMware is exceptionally easy and even the configuration of the application should not pose a problem to the average PC user. When setting up each virtual machine, the user is prompted with a series of simple questions and generally VMware suggests a setting for the item in question based on the OS being installed and the host PC's specifications. In general, you can simply go with the suggestions and your VMs will run fine.The default partition size is 4GB and the user can alter the memory allocation to the VM if they wish to increase or decrease the general performance. Operating systems can be purchased from VMware as disk images that can be simply copied over to the newly created partition, or you can chose to "bake your own" as we did. As with Virtual PC, we tested VMware on Windows XP host with Windows 2000 and SuSE Linux VMs.
You will notice from the table that VMware has its own proprietary display driver. When you first install your OS, Windows 2000 for example, you are presented with the 640 x 480 16-colour display. After the OS is installed you then install the VMware "tools" which amongst other things install the proprietary display driver. This could be a bit of a trap if VMware does not support the OS you are attempting to install. And, although the audio drivers are Sound Blaster 16 compatible, they are not recognised by the Device Manager as such, and so may also be a problem with unsupported OSes. We feel it would have been far safer to simply emulate a known hardware standard transparently, particularly in the case of the video drivers.
There was also a minor problem with our system in that the COM ports did not install correctly and Device Manager claimed there were not enough free resources. The audio driver also refused to function correctly. It was nice to see that the USB ports were supported.
VMware provides four methods of connecting to your LAN: bridged connection (which we used), Network Address Translation which shares the host's IP address, a private shared network that treats the host as a separate physical PC, and a custom virtual network. We had no problem configuring the VM using the bridged option and connections to the LAN were seamless and quite fast.
The toolbar has four buttons for power on and off, Suspend, Reset, and full screen. Through the menus you can access the configuration editor, preferences, manage virtual networks, disconnect drives and USB devices, and configure the Local and Global priority of VM. In the latter case, rather than use the terms foreground and background, VMware uses "grabbed" and "ungrabbed". The four indicators along the status bar display drive and network activity.
Running our suite of benchmarks and apps was for the most part clear sailing, although we could not load version 2 of Winbench99 (the installation procedure would simply crash; we overcame this by installing an earlier version and then upgrading it). All the applications in Business Winstone 2001 ran without a hitch but we could not get the sound emulation to work correctly. We found cutting and pasting between the VM and host only worked with text, and not files or folders. We were disappointed we could not simply drag and drop files and folders between VM and host. Cursor behaviour was at times annoying and certainly not as smooth in a VM as Virtual PC for example. Also when a CD was ejected or loaded there was a significantly long period of time when the cursor simply froze and was not available.
Performance on the other hand was very good and in the common business applications we ran VMware on average managed 56 percent of the host PC's performance.
| Product: | VMware V3.2 |
| Price: | Boxed CD AU$585, downloaded $510 |
| Vendor: | Microway |
| Phone: | 1300 553 313 |
| Web: | www.vmware.com |
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| Interoperability: |
Runs on most Linux and Windows x86 platforms but not OS/2 or Mac. |
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| Futureproofing: |
½
Proprietary drivers for some emulated hardware subsystems could prove to be a problem if an OS needs to be installed that is not directly supported by VMware. |
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| ROI: |
½A little more expensive than Virtual PC but still reasonably priced. |
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| Service: |
½Free Web, e-mail, and telephone 9-5 Mon-Fri if purchased locally; phone support $165 per incident if downloaded. Premium packages are available. |
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| Rating: |
½ |
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| Minimum system requirements: |
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