vmware, parallels, another VM option, or dual boot?

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Sat Jun 23, 2007 11:16 am

Yeah - I'd agree with that assessment after the trials I ran. The major issue for me is that vmware is nearly $200. For that kind of money, I'd rather dual boot. Parallels pissed me off in a few ways, but in all seems like a solid project. The fact that it had to be run via sudo was a dealkiller though - I can't count how many unanswered questions I saw on the forums about this and other well known linux issues. I'm not getting the feeling that they really care about the linux market. If it were the only game out there, I would have been happy to run it, though. Right now I'm using virtualbox - though their license is of some concern to me, it's been pretty solid this time 'round. The fact that they maintain an ubuntu repo is nice, too.

schotty · Post by **schotty** » Mon Jul 02, 2007 6:15 pm

VMware server is free. However VMWare Workstation is a little better for using multiple vms on a ... workstation.

I am using that now, and have had zero issues (other than no vm extensions on the computers' cpu).

CptnObvious999 · Post by **CptnObvious999** » Tue Jul 03, 2007 11:38 am

I have not yet gotten a chance to mess around with virtual machines yet but when I get my new laptop I want to be able to run Linux and Windows XP side-by-side and if possible be able to dual-boot into that Windows partition by itself if need be. I will be getting a laptop with a Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 and 2GB of RAM so it should be able to run any VM method. I would like it as fast as possible and has to be free as in beer. What would you say is the best solution that is fairly easy to setup?

Also does Windows have to go through the boot up every time you start the VM? or does it just come back from suspend? And would I have to reinstall Linux to setup a VM solution?

Thanks

allix · Post by **allix** » Sun Jul 29, 2007 3:17 am

I modified a bios to enable virtualisation using Modbin6 , motherboard being GIGABYTE GA-M57SLI-S4 , that board is LinuxBios compatible but like Troels i want stability

so i wait a little longer before putting that on.

Anyway to get to the crunch, i am testing KVM , so far i don't have anything negative to shout about, kvm is basically a module that uses qemu as its front end, so its easy to use and the speed is very close to native as it uses the chips in my case amd-v technology, intel have vt.

There are gui front ends to kvm/qemu which you can use to manage various os's.
http://qemulator.createweb.de/
http://gkvm.sourceforge.net/
http://virt-manager.et.redhat.com/

The last one is really part of Fedora.

I Think it will be a good idea to interview Avi Kivity who started the project.
http://www.qumranet.com/