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Which OS Makes the Best VMWare Host?

Posted by Cliff on Sat May 20, 2006 08:55 PM
from the better-than-a-multi-boot dept.
Operating Systems Software
astrojetsonjr asks: "A few days ago, Trillian_1138 asked about running Linux on a laptop. Yagu started a thread suggesting the use of VMWare to allow running multiple flavors of Linux and Windows at the same time. Lots of readers then posted their success stories using VMWare . My primary machine is an IBM laptop and I'm getting ready to move to using VMWare to allow me run Linux, Solaris and Windows at the same time. First, what is the OS/distro with which you have had the best success hosting VMWare? Finally, what host OS install and setup tips do suggest?"
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[+] Technology: VMware to Make Server Product Free (as in beer) 216 comments
yahyamf writes "CNET News.com is reporting that in the face of increasing competition in the OS virtualization market VMWare is going to give away its GSX server product for free, in the hope that customers who try it will eventually migrate to the more powerful ESX server. The company recently released a free VMWare Player which could only run but not create virtual machines. The company faces competition from rival products such as SWsoft's Virtuozzo, Mircrosoft's Virtual Server, as well as open source software like Xen"
[+] Advice for Linux on a Laptop? 276 comments
Trillian_1138 is seeking your advice on the following: "So I'm looking at replacing my aging laptop. I have a desktop running Ubuntu, which I use as a primary, and it is more than adequate for my needs. However, I'd love a small, portable laptop to use in class and on trips. I've been looking at the MacBook Pros and, more recently, the MacBooks, and was almost ready to buy the low-end MacBook and be done with it. I liked its ability to dual-book to Windows for a couple of school-related programs, but the more I thought about it the more I like using Ubuntu at home and the less reason I saw to buy a Mac if I could use Ubuntu on a laptop. This brought me to the idea of buying a laptop to use as a dual-boot Linux/Window machine, either with Linux or Windows pre-installed, and setting up a dual-boot with the other OS. Might any of you have advice, anecdotes, success stories, horror stories, or general input?"
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  • Priorities first. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ant P. (974313) on Saturday May 20 2006, @09:04PM (#15373992) Homepage
    Pick whichever supports most of the physical hardware, since whatever it can't see the emulated OS can't either. If you're left with more than one choice there, narrow it down further depending on which matters to you more: speed, stability, security etc. Of course in a perfect world you wouldn't need to choose between those, but then you wouldn't need a virtual machine either.
      • That's a bitch to get acceleration working in some, if not all, Linux distributions.
        No, getting 3d acceleration is quite easy.

        The problem is that the card and/or drivers are very finnicky, so it's hard to get 3d and suspend to work at the same time. Unfortunately, the workarounds provided in the Windows drivers don't work for Linux, and the vendors of Designed For Windows hardware refuse to give us Linux people any love.

        • While 3d acceleration works fine under linux how are you getting it working under VMware? If VMware supported 3d hardware I'd think about using for games that cedega doesn't support but currently they don't touch it with a 30ft pole. Even being able to switch control of the video card between the host/guest OS for full-screen support would be a step forward.
      • > That's a bitch to get acceleration working in some, if not all, Linux distributions.

        All ATi chips before and including the r250 (ranging from the RADEON 7000 to the RADEON 9250) have open source drivers bundled with Xorg and the Linux kernel. All other ATi chips can be used with the binary drivers from ATi. The thinkpads I know have RADEON MOBILITY 7500 chips, so they are perfectly supported.

        > On the other hand, I run Debian on my T30, no acceleration on the video at all. It used to be working jus

  • Which OS Makes the Best VMWare Host?

    Why do you want to run VMWare? I have used both VMWare and qemu (as well as Xen, but I don't think that will work if you are interested in running Windows), and have found qemu to be the superior of the two. Sure, there is no built in GUI, but there are external 3rd party GUIs available if you want. Seriously, qemu makes networking much easier thatn VMWare does. No need to mess with modules (unless you want the accelerator, which I recommend), no need for services or daemons running like with VMWare. Additionally, it is open source, which I consider a huge plus. You can also emulate other CPUs. Want to emulate a PowerPC so that you can test compiling your app on FreeBSD on a PowerPC processor? How about Sparc? The *only* way in which I would see VMWare as being superior is if you are using one of their server consolidation products (GSX or ESX, I think). For workstation-level stuff, qemu is the way to go.

    • Don't forget coLinux (Score:5, Informative)

      by spiritraveller (641174) on Saturday May 20 2006, @09:18PM (#15374030)
      If Windows is the host, coLinux [colinux.org] is a worthy solution. It runs almost as fast as a native install. And you can download a preconfigured Debian or Gentoo root image from the website.

      Basically, it is a Linux kernel patched to run under Windows.
    • Don't forget that now with Qemu 0.8.1 and the 1.3.x-pre acceleration module, kernel-mode acceleration of the target is also supported.

    • Re:Let me answer your question with a question (Score:5, Insightful)

      by inflex (123318) on Sunday May 21 2006, @04:47AM (#15375155)
      >>Why do you want to run VMWare? I have used both VMWare and qemu (as well as Xen, but I don't think that will work if you are interested in running Windows)

      What is it with people and their desire to try and disseminate your reason for having or wanting to, God forbid, purchased a software package. Mostly I hear it from people who -

      - don't use VM's for business work
      - don't like commercial software
      - don't understand that time == money
      - have more time on their hands than pending tasks

      It's one thing to not want to purchase software, fair enough - but let's not try and stone people.

      Fact is, vmware out of the "box" runs and runs very well. It's a dead simple system to use even with an unsupported distro like Slackware linux. It's $199 USD (for workstation) and the cost of the purchase is long forgotten after the ease of use has saved you many times more. There's a lot more "messing around" with other solutions. You can burn up $199 in wages in half a day.

      The difference between a functional package and a usable -and- functional package often isn't a lot but it's a small difference that a lot of people are more than happy to pay for.

  • Windows is probably the best host for workstation, mostly because the current state of video drivers makes windows better for any app that needs graphical output. I haven't run GSX/server, but given my experience with ESX I would assume that linux is superior for those kinds of workloads.

  • Under Linux (Score:3, Insightful)

    by yhetti (57297) <yhetti@shevi[ ]et ['x.n' in gap]> on Saturday May 20 2006, @09:15PM (#15374022) Homepage
    I've been using VMWare Workstation and GSX (now just "Server") very successfully under Linux. I have two virtualized Linux and three virtualized 2003 Server instances on a 2x Opteron 240. It works wonderfully.

    However, to be honest, on a laptop it likely makes more sense to run the host as WinXP. With Linux hosting and XP in Vmware, you don't get hardware graphics acceleration (perhaps in either OS.) Linux and laptops are still not there yet, so you may as well use XP as the host OS and get full hardware support.
    • I've been running various incarnations of SuSE for the last two years on a T42 without any issues. The only hardware not supported is the Winmodem (and I'm reasonably confident I could get it working if I felt like devoting some time to it). I have VMWare Workstation running with two different XPPro guests and a Slowaris for Intel guest as well.

      Your point about framebuffer acceleration under Windows is well taken. However, the only thing I really need the XP VM for is IE...some wag built the corporate

  • VMWare ESX (Score:4, Informative)

    by danpat (119101) on Saturday May 20 2006, @09:25PM (#15374046) Homepage
    VMWare ESX runs without an underlying OS (it provides one of its own). It might be overkill for your needs though....

    http://www.vmware.com/products/esx/ [vmware.com]

    • Re:VMWare ESX (Score:5, Insightful)

      by OiBoy (22100) <`caleb' `at' `webninja.com'> on Saturday May 20 2006, @10:13PM (#15374169) Homepage
      And would be absolutely useless on a laptop since ESX requires SCSI.
      • Does ESX Server Run on Linux? On Windows?
        ESX Server runs natively on server hardware, without a host operating system. The ESX Server virtualization layer is a highly compact and efficient operating system kernel entirely developed by VMware for optimum virtual machine performance. This allows ESX Server to fully manage the hardware resources and provide the highest levels of security and performance isolation. ESX Server also incorporates a service console based on a Linux 2.4 kernel that is used to boot t
        • ESX Server also incorporates a service console based on a Linux 2.4 kernel that is used to boot the ESX Server virtualization layer.

          I'm reasonably sure this is marketing-speak for "ESX server is an application that runs on the Linux OS". Would it really be reasonable for VMWare to deal with all the low-level hardware driver crud when there's Linux right there?

          • Nope (Score:3, Insightful)

            by blueZ3 (744446)
            ESX is an OS in itself, not derived from Linux. However, ESX includes a "Linux-compatibility layer" that provides compatibility with Linux on some level (drivers, for instance). The console OS is a linux derivative I believe, but the COS is just an interface to the ESX Server OS.
            • Definitely. ESX may look like Red Hat when you're installing it, but when the service console fires up the VMKernel it is entirely separate from the console OS. The hardware supported by ESX is very limited as well so it's best to plan the purchase of it along with new hardware. We've had excellent results with IBM servers for instance since they're partners. Of course, you're going to pay a premium for the hardware, but consolidating 20-30 servers onto one quad processor server box is much nicer than h

  • It depends... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 222 (551054) * <stormseeker@@@gmail...com> on Saturday May 20 2006, @09:29PM (#15374058) Homepage
    I've run GSX Server on both Win2k3 64-bit and Suse Enterprise 64-bit, and neither one really presented any issues. The linux configuration is slightly more complicated, but its nothing to really shake a stick at.

    The core issue is which OS are you more familiar with? If that isn't an issue, then there are some benefits to the *nix side of things.

    It's possible to get a linux install down to 200~ megs while only using 64 megs of system memory, which is a strong advantage. If I understand correctly ESX Server is essentially a very very thin linux distro. That should say something ;)

    I've also read of a perl script that can make hot backups of a Virtual Machine; while this is possible under Windows using commercial products, it's another thing to be taken into consideration.

    Hope this helps ;)
    • You are correct about ESX essentially being a very stripped down RedHat install. It has some stringent hardware requirements, however (SCSI, limited NIC support, requires 2 physical cores minimum), so not really good for the consumer market. I know ESX comes with a pl script called VMSnap, which performs a hot backup to a remote linux host (or anything that understands scp, really). I wodner if the same script can be hacked to work with GSX.

      Which reminds me, is there any specialty linux distro in the works

  • On my laptop.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Trelane (16124) on Saturday May 20 2006, @09:33PM (#15374071) Journal
    I run Linux, and have VMware around for the (thankfully very very few) times I need to run Windows. With attached storage, I'm thinking about also doing a SuSE image, to help walk my parents through how to do things on their computers.

    So, as a Linux user, I run Linux as the host, and Windows XP & 98 as the guests.

    That's my situation anyway. Things work fine on my laptop under Linux, and I hope my next laptop will be even better (since I'll be ditching ATI on the laptop for Intel (and a linux pre-install, which should give the "works with linux" guarantee even if I don't keep the original install around (plus, I get to give a distro money!)), which will likely make things even easier.)

    • I should also mention that I had great success with vmware workstation 5.5 running through at least one, if not several suspend-resume cycles. It was without the ATI driver (fglrx) in the kernel, and as is well-known, all bets are off when ati starts mucking about in your kernel. It just kept going like nothing had happened.

  • Depends on your hardware. (Score:4, Informative)

    by CFD339 (795926) <andrewp@ t h e north.com> on Saturday May 20 2006, @09:41PM (#15374099) Homepage Journal
    VMWARE on Win32 will only be as stable as Win32 of course. So from that perspective, most people here would agree that Linux makes a better host.

    On the other hand, if you're running a laptop or have some high end video or hard disk that requires drivers not available for linux, you may find your performance better under Windows (again, depending on many things, like how you configure vmware and its use of hardware).

    There's no perfect answer to your question. My plans for new LAPTOPS will be to run the native drivers with Win32 as the host. Custom build desktops, however, I may well run the opposite way.
    • > VMWARE on Win32 will only be as stable as Win32 of course.

      The days of 'unstable Win32' died with Win9x and ME... 2000 and XP on supported hardware is just as stable as any other OS. Linux fans who claim otherwise (usually on the basis that they saw a friend's Windows system crash) have about as much credibility as the idiots who reflexively claim all kernel panics to be 'linux bugs'.

      • Yes windows stability has improved over the years, but it asks you to reboot for the most trivial changes. What a crock.
      • XP is stable in the absence of external factors. Yes, it doesn't randomly blue screen most of the time now.

        HOWEVER...if you start actually using it day to day, you become vulnerable to many 0-day exploits (see the recent Word/rootkit issue) and so in practice you can end up with many problems through no fault of your own. If you think this isn't an issue for you, please note the many infections that have occured through non-obvious vectors (viewing .jpg and .wmf files, playing a Sony audio CD, installing

  • Linux and XFS (Score:4, Informative)

    by jtatum (164201) * on Saturday May 20 2006, @09:44PM (#15374104)
    I've run Workstation and GSX (Server) on Windows and Linux. The best performance by far was Linux with XFS. Ext3 does not cut it (regardless of writeback option used). XFS support is a little tricky to find in VMWare supported distros. For less critical servers, I prefer Centos 4 with the Centosplus kernel (see the Readme [centos.org]). Centos isn't supported by VMWare but Red Hat is.

    VMWare Server supports Ubuntu as a host. It's a little easier to setup XFS and VMWare on Ubuntu. VMWare server claims experimental support for Ubuntu Dapper. I am running it on two servers for testing and it is performing very well. As Ubuntu gains popularity, the choice may be clearer. For right now, Google University has more help for VMWare on Red Hat^W^WCentos than Ubuntu.

    If your system is AMD64/EM64T, you may be tempted to load a 64-bit OS. Resist the temptation. VMWare now claims official support for x64 host operating systems, but in practice these are more trouble to get working than they are worth (MUI, authentication, and even stability can be problematic IMO). With hardware that supports 64-bit virtualization (many new Pentiums and Opterons), 64-bit guests can be run on both 32- and 64-bit hosts. Determining whether your CPU supports it is so difficult, VMWare made a tool to do it for you called the processor check utility. (It's about halfway down this page [vmware.com].) Down the road when 4GB+ is standard on laptops, VMWare's x64 support will probably be a lot better.
    • a word of warning about xfs: make sure you can always shutdown cleanly, or data loss and/or filesystem corruption can easily result. With that caveat in mind, however, XFS totally rocks.

      • Re:Linux and XFS (Score:4, Insightful)

        by fimbulvetr (598306) on Saturday May 20 2006, @10:23PM (#15374196)
        Which is exactly why I quit using XFS. For production systems that reboot semi-often and cleanly, XFS is good. When XFS is up for quite some time (On 2.4.x at least, it can tend to get messy after 1yr+ of uptime with heavy writes. Eventually you'll have to umount and do an xfs repair just to get it back to normal.) it's not too good.

        Even worse story for crashes. I've had to go to backup many times because a heavily used system locks up and XFS gets into it's unable to find superblocks or another one of it's infamous cryptic, non documented bugs/errors. I don't recall ever having to do this on a ext3 system unless the disk went bad or it crashed multiple times without a fsck.

        That said, XFS is an excellent choice is some areas, such as realtime (soft guarentee) systems, etc.
        • --Suggest you try JFS instead. I switched all my big Reiserfs partitions over to JFS and haven't had a problem; except that sometimes you need a (very) quick fsck before mount. YMMV.
      • Apparently that is not really true anymore with the 2.6.x kernel, whereas XFS was a little flaky with the 2.4.x kernels. I had several ex-SGI employees on the local LUG link to a ream of data showing that the flakiness has been fixed for the 2.6 kernel series. I had thus switched my ReiserFS 3.6 partitions to XFS and they benchmarked a little better and I've had zero problems with them even after a bunch of unclean umounts due to playing with laptop suspend/resume.
    • --I've had good results speedwise with JFS filesystems, even after a crash. I'm a reiserfs fan for the small file tail-packing feature (makes it good for root filesystem and Squid cache) but speedwise, JFS is much better - especially for Writes.

      --For a drop-in vmware solution, I'd recommend Ubuntu. Vmware has precompiled kernel modules for it; and it's debian-derived, which means all the apt-get goodness.

  • Depends on what you need... (Score:5, Informative)

    by ID10T5 (797857) on Saturday May 20 2006, @09:47PM (#15374113)
    Having run VMware (I'm assuming workstation) on both Windows and Linux hosts, I have seen plusses on both.

    VMware needs kernel hooks to provide its virtualization services. Under Linux, there are only a few supported Linux distros (and specific versions at that) that have pre-built modules installed as part of VMware. I run my personal VMware on an FC5 Linux host, and had to download an unsupported "patch" (from one of the VMware developers -- not even hosted on the VMware web site) to allow the vmware-config.pl script to build the necessary modules for my specific kernel. Every time I upgrade kernels, I must then rebuild the modules to get VMware working again. Also, under FC5 with SELinux enabled, I had to manually change the context of one of the VMware files after install before SELinux would even allow VMware to run. Under Windows, all of the above "just works".

    Under Linux, I get better performance when running multiple VM's at the same time. I have had three 384MB VM's running at the same time, and because of memory management under Linux I only saw an increase of approximately 600MB vs. not running the VM's (no swap increase either). I also have better I/O performance as well. When installing the 3 VM's above, I had the CD's mapped to ISO files on the same disk that my VMware files were being created on. During the install, my load average was constantly around 15 and my system was definitely slower, but it was still functional. I have brought a Windows host (with enough memory to host both VM's fully in RAM -- no swapping) to its knees trying to install just 2 VM's simultaneously in the same way (ISO files on the same disk as the VMware files). It was so unresponsive, it took almost 5 minutes to bring up Task Manager to see what was going wrong -- and Task Manager didn't really show me what was wrong, just that the CPU was pegged and the VMware processes were doing all the work.

  • The latest release 0.8.1 of QEMU (along with 1.3.0 of KQEMU) achieves a surprisingly fast and stable emulation for a free (as in beer) tool.

    You can save yourself the money and just use QEMU. It emulates a PC just fine and can run most anything as a guest. I use it for a Windows guest so I can write my book. Granted my workstation is a "bit" high end, but when I full screen it, it's just like running a real Windows box (shudder).

    Trick is to make sure the KQEMU accelerator is loaded and running correctly.

  • Debian (Score:3, Informative)

    by metamatic (202216) on Sunday May 21 2006, @12:15AM (#15374534) Homepage Journal
    VMware Workstation runs nicely under Debian Testing, with ReiserFS filesystem.

    • I have to use VMWare Workstation on my machine at work. I run Debian testing, and must disagree with the parent poster.

      Unfortunately, the VMWare propritary kernel modules don't come with binary version prebuilt for Debian kernel. Ok, fair enough, there are installation scripts that build them for you. But they don't work with the Debian kernel versions either.

      The vmware-any-any patch [ftp.cvut.cz] helps a lot. This gets you working kernel modules. But I still have weird problems. If I shutdown my machine, vmwa

  • Linux. I have no choice. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Just to share some experience. I have just bought a new computer but with no floppy drive (to save money). Therefore, I could not load the SATA driver during windows install from floppy and could not install Windows XP.

    After struggled for 1 week (trying to rebuild the windows install CD to include the driver, etc), I installed VMWare Server in linux, installed XP in a virtual machine directly accessing the harddisk, installed the SATA driver and eventually got a working windows which boot from BIOS.

    http://f [mocasting.com]
  • VMWare was originally designed to run under linux, and there are still some advantages to running it this way:

    If a usb device has no driver under linux then it can be passed straight through and driven by an os running under vmware (you have to unload native linux drivers for any device you want passed to vmware), the windows version works differently in that you must have a native driver installed before you can pass a device to vmware. This issue has manifested itself many times when we've been at customer sites and presented with a random usb device (usb to serial adapters mainly) for which windows requires extra drivers (and linux includes drivers in the default kernel).

    Performance - networking runs much faster when vmware is running atop linux, this is especially important for me as i`m often doing pentesting which involves lots of network scanning...

    Security - you can nat your windows images behind your base linux install, your base linux can have everything turned off to minimise the chances of it being exploited (windows will often not let you turn some services off)

    And finally, try vmware server as opposed to workstation, you can run it headless and only attach a gui when you want one..
      • I wouldn't necessarily concur. I run VMware on a XP Pro host, on my laptop with a 1.86 GHz Pentium M (2MB L2 cache, and I suspect this helps immensely) with 2GB of memory, and an XP Pro guest - I like the idea of having my core, essential apps only on the host, and anything likely to 'crud things up' can be thrown on the guest. Performance is quite near native.
      • I ran VMware Server on my 2.2GHz Pentium 4-M laptop with 1GB RAM with SuSE 10.0 as the host OS and Windows XP as the guest. It installed and ran cleanly, but yes, my 4-year-old laptop wasn't that fast. The Windows guest ran about like it was on a PIII-800, but the entire computer was still usable, inside and outside the VM. Now, my 2.2GHz dual-core Athlon 64 desktop with 2GB RAM runs the same guest OS and host OS and it runs far faster and the computer is far more responsive inside and outside the VM. After
        • --Best speed I've gotten is LVM'ing (2) 120GB IDE UDMA 133 drives [7200 RPM] into (1) Striped ~240GB volume, and formatting it with JFS. 32MB+/second SUSTAINED WRITE speeds. And Read speed is phenomenal.

          --Economical and practical also, from a $$/time POV. If you don't already have one, google for a Silicon Image IDE 133 PCI board and hook the drives up to that. ;-)
          • I can achieve a 55-60MB sustained write speed (granted, it was in making/transferring large files, not a lot of little ones) and ~70MB read speed on a single 74GB WD Raptor. RAID0 does help with the speed, but it also 1/n the MTBF of the drives, so I wouldn't do it. But if I wanted to, I could simply get two more Raptors and hook them into the spare two SATA ports on my board and let my NForce4 chipset control them in RAID 0 and do so with a much higher transfer rate than a PCI bus can support. 2 WD Raptors
      • (ahem) Bullshit. I run Vmware Workstation 5.5 on a P750 Dell Latitude, with 384MB RAM ad 20GB HD == NO problems. XP + Ubuntu, dual-boot.

        You know what you doing.
        Move all "zig".
        For great justice.
      • Here are two examples with empirical data to support them. Either the T41 is an extremely exceptional machine (It is nice, but I wouldn't go that far) or VMWare runs on both operating systems with what could be called "acceptable" results.
        To get more accurate information you would have to look for (or perform) some well designed and run benchmarks. Determine which is your prefered Operating System. Also, find out if there are any functional limitations to VMWare on either of these platforms

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