VMware Workstation 5.5.1

VMWare is a virtual machine software. It is like VirtualPC for Windows. It allows you to run a "guest" Operating System inside of a "host" operating system. Once this guest operating system is running you can install Applications and run services that the Guest OS supports. For example, if your host OS is Linux you can run Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows 9x and you will be able to run applications for Windows inside of that environment. and vice versa. VMWare is built by no other than VMWare Inc. It is offered in 2 flavors, VMWare Workstation or VMWare Server.

Installation

VMWare can be installed under Linux by typing rpm -ivh , after installation type vmware-config.pl to build you vmmon,vmnet modules. Now before you start worrying about having to build anything under Linux the build process is totally automated and very exact. The Windows installation is done by double-clicking the .exe file.

Features

VMWare sports a Configuration wizard where you can decide what guest OS you wish to install, decide how much virtual disk you will give the machine as well as CD-ROM and Floppy configuration. It also offers host only, Nat or bridged networking. Bridged networking allows you to use either physical Ethernet cards, like I do, or a virtual network. Host Only allows you to access the file system on your machine and is done by virtual networking. It has a configuration editor for post install configuration. With the configuration editor you can configure RAM and other things like sound, Ethernet, USB. Guest Operating Systems can be Windows 9x, NT, 2000, XP and a variety of Windows Server Operating Systems, Free BSD or another Linux distribution. You can even install Plan 9. Plan 9 has a VMWare virtual disk available for download from the official Plan 9 site. Networking in VMware 5 is very much improved. In previous versions, networking was daunting to say the least. In VMware 5 it is pretty much automatic once you get the settings correct in the module build process.

VMware 5 is super fast. In comparison to VMWare 3.x it is about 30% faster. When compared to Bochs or Win4Lin it blows them away in speed. You still have some issues in regards to the VMWare run-time engine, you can tell this from booting. When you get into the actual guest OS, you can really tell the difference. Overall it boots faster and is more responsive and if you go into full screen mode it is easy to forget you are on a Linux workstation. In VMWare 3.x I had to allocate 512 mb of Virtual RAM in order to get any kind of decent performance. In VMware 5 I am running 256 mb of virtual RAM and performance is awesome.