Virtual Machines

[news.microsoft.com]

Hey All,

I'm just wondering if any of you fellow developers has done any formal
evaluation between VirtualPC and VMWare or other similar tools and what your
thoughts were on the subject.

Thanks,

TC

 

[Duggi]

Hey All,

I'm just wondering if any of you fellow developers has done any formal
evaluation between VirtualPC and VMWare or other similar tools and what your
thoughts were on the subject.

Thanks,

TC

I use a combination of VMWorkstation and MS VirtualPC for my testing
environment. I do not find difference in executing with C# binaries
atleast. They work similarly in both the environments.

What you are exactly looking for???

-Cnu

 

[TC]

I am particularly interested in the performance and behavior while working
in these virtual environments and since developers are arguably those which
use such tools the most, I figured that someone such as yourself could offer
insight.

Thanks

Hey All,

I'm just wondering if any of you fellow developers has done any formal
evaluation between VirtualPC and VMWare or other similar tools and what
your
thoughts were on the subject.

Thanks,

TC

I use a combination of VMWorkstation and MS VirtualPC for my testing
environment. I do not find difference in executing with C# binaries
atleast. They work similarly in both the environments.

What you are exactly looking for???

-Cnu

 

[Duggi]

I am particularly interested in the performance and behavior while working
in these virtual environments and since developers are arguably those which
use such tools the most, I figured that someone such as yourself could offer
insight.

Thanks





I use a combination of VMWorkstation and MS VirtualPC for my testing
environment. I do not find difference in executing with C# binaries
atleast. They work similarly in both the environments.

What you are exactly looking for???

-Cnu

Performance and tool... Personally I like VMWorkstation rather virtual
PC.

I did not do any benchmarking though.

-Cnu

 

[Marc Gravell]

We used to use Virtual PC (largely because we were licensed for it via
MSDN), but found VMware felt more responsive during use. No specific
benchmarks, though - other than a number of people previously moaning
about performance no longer moan. The only glitch we had was
originally it felt slow via RDP because the graphic adapter on the
virtual had hardware acceleration disabled - we moved that to full and
it works great. For most purposes, even VMware player is sufficient.
Oh, and VMware didn't support the MAC addresses we had pre-allocated
(for DHCP reservations) - we got around that by using auto-generated
VMware MAC addresses and using the OS to do the MAC-spoofing (to our
pre-allocated MACs) via the NIC settings.

Both come with very similar utilities (for example, to drag files
between desktops etc). VMware converter made the switch painless.

Marc

 

[Leon Lambert]

Following are a few reasons I like VMWare better.
1) When using NAT networking i can have my VPC talk to the corporate
servers via VPN (Virtual Private Network). I could not make VirtualPC
work. This is important to me since i am a %100 remote employee.
2) I can have VMWare build its hard drives in pieces. I choose 2gig
chunks. This makes it much easier to defragment my hard drives.
3)VMWare can emulate dual core processors meaning you can actually
troubleshoot concurrency problems in them.
4) VMWare feels much more responsive but have no actual performance
statistics to back this up.

I have been using Virtual PCs for many years. I use VirtualPC about 70%
of the time because the team I am in has chosen that. I use VMWare when
not doing work related to the team.

Hope this helps.
Leon Lambert

 

[Jim H]

Hey All,

I'm just wondering if any of you fellow developers has done any formal
evaluation between VirtualPC and VMWare or other similar tools and what
your thoughts were on the subject.

Thanks,

TC

I've been using virtual machines for years. I prefer VMWare. One of the
main reasons is support for USB devices. I can actually debug software that
connects to USB devices inside the VMWare machine. VPC did not used to have
any USB support other than mouse (not sure where they are at now). New 6.5
VMWare actually allows you to switch hosting USB device between virtual
machine and host machine. It even recognizes web cams, ipods, and printers.
VMWare 6.5 also supports DirectX 9c and games now.

$.02
jim

 

[Marc Gravell]

One of the main reasons is support for USB devices.

The USB support in VMware is indeed very good. Best is when I mis-
click, and transfer my external USB hard-disk to the virtual PC... can
you guess where the virtual machine is physically stored? And yet I
keep doing it... ;-p

Marc